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PRESBYTERIAN CLERGYMAN 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



BY ONE OF THREE HUNDRED. 



■ftX. 



K 1876. i 



NEW-YORK: 
GENERAL PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL 
SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION. 



1849. 
ft 








Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by John 
Mitchell, (as Treasurer of The General Protestant Episcopal S 
Union,) in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United State 
l he Southern District of New- York. 


w. 

. S. 

3 for 










1 








Pudney & Russell, Printers. 



A PRESBYTERIAN CLERGYMAN 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CONFLICT. 

The writer of this narrative was once a Presbyterian ; I 
may add, that my numerous relatives, near and remote, with a 
single exception, are Presbyterians still. And that which I had 
been by birth and education, and without my consent or fault, 
I afterward became from conviction, and unhappily that spe- 
cies of conviction which is always absolute — satisfied with 
the potent reasoning, which even to a Nathanael, may some- 
times seem conclusive — " Can there any good thing come out 
of Nazareth ?" The question was unfortunately one, which 
modest worth has always found it difficult to answer ; and I 
had never met with a Philip of Bethsaida, to say, " Come and 
see." 

Of the Episcopalians, whose friendship I had enjoyed from 
childhood up, not one, so far as my recollections serve me 



6 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



ever made the slightest attempt to proselyte me to his faith; 
and even after it came to be suspected that my mind was dis- 
turbed upon the claims of Episcopacy — when an expression 
of sympathy, or an exchange of views, or a friendly consul- 
tation upon personal and local difficulties, that never find their 
solution in books and authors, would have been unspeakably 
refreshing to my mind, then grappling in its own solitude with 
its new perceptions of truth and duty — still, if the fact be 
creditable .to Episcopalians, I may record it to their praise, 
that I never met with either layman or priest among them, who 
seemed so much as to care, whether a wanderer should come 
into his fold or not ; but I felt many a time perplexed by the 
indifference with which they appeared to entertain a subject, 
on which my own mind was expending its most restless and 
intense anxieties. Whether those on the higher rounds of the 
ladder, reaching by God's ordinance from earth to heaven, 
were so far above me, as not to understand the pressure of an 
atmosphere that they had never breathed, or had not the skill 
to reach the helping hand so low ; and that those lower down 
upon the same perceived so little difference between my ele- 
vation and their own, as to wonder that I should have suffered 
inconvenience or should have desired a change ; or whether 
both high and low had forgotten that that ladder, with its 
facilities for climbing to the skies, was for me as much as for 
them ; it would be irrelevant, and perhaps unbecoming, at pre- 
sent to inquire. It is enough to say, that I was excluded from 
the sympathies of Churchmen, both high and low; and, in 
looking at the past, I often feel like one who has made his 
way across some desert, where the foot-prints of the wander- 
ers, in a thousand different directions, seemed rather to bewil- 
der than to guide, and who therefore must ascribe his preser- 
vation and his better fortune tcrthe grace that kept his eye upon 
the guiding star. 

I may not be able to tell the precise moment, up to which I 



THE CONFLICT. 



7 



remained a Presbyterian, nor the moment at which I became 
from conviction an Episcopalian ; but one thing I know, that 
" whereas I was blind, now I see." To speak more accurately, 
while " seeing men as trees walking," I had been at no pains 
to form a definite or fixed conception of the ministry, the 
sacraments, the keys, the Church ; but had rather passed these 
matters over, as things that we were not required to define, 
and which perhaps it were better not to define too nicely, lest, 
peradventure, by running lines and fences, we should be found 
" cursing whom God had not cursed, or defying whom the 
Lord had not defied." But now that, through the mercy of 
Him who hath touched my eyes and told me to " look up," I 
see all things clearly," I am more " ready to give a reason to 
them that ask me," and to say what that Church with its min- 
istry and sacraments must be ; and, standing on the great fact, 
that truth is positive and therefore exclusive, I am ready, too, 
to incur the imputation of an uncharitableness which I can only 
say my principles do not inspire, and of a bigotry which, I can 
only add, my private feelings are infinitely far from cherishing. 
As soon might we hesitate to allow the doctrine of the Holy 
and Ever Blessed Trinity, for fear of branding with heresy, 
the amiable Unitarian, the martyred Nestorian, or the ancient 
Sabellian : or, as soon should we hesitate to define carefully 
and guardedly the awful requisites of repentance, and faith, 
and prayer, and self-mortification, and holiness, lest we should 
cast a shade, perhaps a deep and disheartening shade, upon 
the safety, as regards the future life of many excellent per- 
sons — as to withhold accurate definitions of things pertaining 
to the Church, lest we should rouse the suspicion in others, or 
be accused of harboring the thought ourselves, that, however 
well our neighbors excluded by these definitions may be faring, 
we are persuaded that they might fare better still, and that 
however safe those beyond these lines may be, we feel some 
solicitude that they should be safer still. 



8 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



The truth is, that in a world like this, and with such hearts 
as ours, and amidst the endless influences that within us and 
around us threaten to disappoint the very best of us of His 
salvation, where no fact is so certain or so terrific, as that 
even " the righteous shall be scarcely saved ;" it is our duty to 
dig deep, if we would lay foundations for eternity — to make the 
definitions as accurate as possible — to place and wake the 
watch at every post — to spare nothing from the means of 
grace that a merciful God has placed within our reach ; if by 
any means we " may apprehend that for which we are appre- 
hended of Christ Jesus." 

Although unable perhaps, as already stated, to determine the 
exact moment of the change which I have undergone, I may 
yet be able, before progressing a great deal farther with this 
narrative, to convince even the staunchest believer among my 
former brethren in instantaneous conversions, that mine to 
Episcopacy, however gradual and cautious, has been earnest 
and honest — the result of a conflict deep enough and enough 
prolonged, to furnish one plausible phenomenon more for the 
theory of irresistible grace. Indeed, one who has not been 
fated to pass the same ordeal, can never understand " the fight- 
ings without and the fears within," of a soul escaping, as it has 
been my happy lot to do, from the mazes of sectarianism, in its 
endless genealogies, into the genial bosom of the Church. 

To abjure a well-compacted system of opinions, to which I 
have been publicly committed, and which I must now allow 
that I have held on insufficient grounds — to determine that I 
will " not consult with flesh and blood," where all who are dear 
to me in life would earnestly resist me ; to resolve that I may 
not even " go and bid them farewell that are at home at my 
house," well knowing that I cannot answer their inquiries to 
their satisfaction ; to disturb and break asunder the ties of bro- 
therhood, which time and afriendly intercourse and many an oc- 
casion of " sweet counselling together," have long and endear- 



THE CONFLICT. 



9 



ingly connected ; to withhold the homage that nature seems to 
claim for the ashes of the cherished dead, by appearing to 
insinuate a defect in their religion, and, with motives easy of 
misapprehension, to leave " the dead to bury their dead" — to 
overcome the countless expedients and sophistries to which the 
heart resorts, in order to persuade itself that whatever be the 
secret conviction, it is at least unnecessary to avow it openly ; 
to encounter the obloquy that one must look for, in break- 
ing old associations for reasons that, by implication, offend 
human pride ; to admit that I have " run without being sent," 
and have performed the holiest offices of the altar without the 
Lord's anointing ; to " go out not knowing whither," and 
incur the necessity of a long probation, before I may earn the 
confidence of my brethren in my new relations ; to be day and 
night agitated and unhappy on a question, on which it would be 
imprudent to seek sympathy, either in the ties about to be sun- 
dered, or in those about to be formed ; to " go up to this Jeru- 
salem, not knowing the things that shall befall me there ;" to feel 
goaded on by inexorable truth, to the fatal moment of proclaim- 
ing the change my mind has undergone ; and, at last, under a 
pressure of conviction, which it would be unsafe longer to 
resist, and impossible ultimately to overcome, to take my new 
position, and yet to have not a doubt that I am right in taking 
it; this is a task that lays under exhausting tribute every 
resource and element of our frail nature. The patient inves- 
tigations, and the sifting of reasons, the earnest longings for 
Divine guidance, and the searchings of heart; the wakeful 
nights and anxious days, wearing the spirits and corroding the 
health; now a determination to dismiss the subject, as one of 
externals and not of essentials, or of order and not of faith ; 
now an effort to believe that it would be a lesser evil to con- 
tinue, even at some hazard, in the old communion, than to 
suffer and to produce in others the necessary mischiefs of a 
change; now a recurrence to old prejudices, a carping at the 



10 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



theory in some of its details, of in its practical and local work- 
ings, or a magnifying of some incidental circumstance, to 
divert the mind, or to embitter it against the new relation, or to 
satisfy it that on the whole, the change would not be materially 
for the better ; now the suggestion, that many learned and 
devout men, " of whom the world was not worthy/' have 
believed that Presbyterianism was a scriptural religion ; now 
the old feeling stealing over me, that my mother, who first 
brought me to Christ, and first taught me to pray, and who 
now " sleeps in Jesus/' lived without blemish, and passed 
" the swellings of Jordan" without fear, in the faith which, 
only as to its securities, I am proposing to abandon ; and again, 
the recollection that my venerable father, now leaning with 
Jacob on his staff, is in the same religion waiting with the 
bright anticipations of a holy hope " until his change come ;" 
these are but some of the tumultuous tossings in the mind of 
the anxious inquirer. The happier child of the Church, who 
was " free-bom," can scarcely conceive the tribute to be paid 
to old prejudices, old habits, old associations, old modes of 
thinking, and chiefly to the old pride of human nature, by one 
who would become " partaker of his liberty." In the words 
of one who purchased at great expense the freedom of Rome, 
when Rome was free — words which were appropriated by 
another, who long ago preceded me in this uneven path — 
" With a great sum obtained I this freedom." 

A struggle like this may perhaps somewhat excuse the en- 
thusiasm, which those, who " from without" have found their 
way into the church, have now and then betrayed. My own 
enthusiasm, if any I have felt, I have endeavored not to make 
offensive to my brethren, either old or new. I have chosen 
rather, under many provocations, to " keep silence even from 
good words," and to enjoy my liberty in quiet thankfulness to 
Him whose word hath made me free. Sometimes I have been 
questioned, and, it would almost appear, in the same spirit in 



THE CONFLICT. 



which the man, twice unfortunate, if I may so say, unfortu- 
nate in having been born blind, and unfortunate in having 
received his sight, was persecuted with the questions, " What 
sayest thou ? What did he unto thee ? How opened he thine 
eyes ?" And sometimes, " out of a good and honest heart," I 
have been asked to give " a reason of the hope that is in me." 
But from considerations that will readily occur to a discreet 
mind, I have felt it proper not to break the covenant with my 
lips. Time may however be now supposed to have sobered down 
the gushing impulses of the " new convert," and also to have 
in some measure healed the wound which only " the necessity 
laid upon me" could have induced me to inflict on those " with 
whom I once walked in company ;" and therefore, from mo- 
tives which I know will be approved by Him, who alone has 
the power to discern, or the right to judge, I now venture to 
give a degree of form and permanence to a brief chapter 
from my own " experience." 

I am but one among more than three hundred ministers, 
who, in this country alone, have, within a few years, been 
' grafted again into the good olive tree/ from which, -on the 
responsibility of our forefathers, we had in evil and violent 
times been " broken off." In reaching this result, there has 
doubtless been no little variety in the trials that we have each 
encountered ; but it is reasonable to suppose that " as the bil- 
lows went over our soul, and deep answered to deep," in the 
general features of our " experience" we have resembled each 
other, as " face answereth to face in a glass." And forasmuch 
as few have taken in hand to give account of those things 
which are most surely believed among us, and especially of 
" that dark and terrible wilderness" through which the Lord 
hath brought us to the fold that was once " one," and is as 
certainly to be one again, it has been suggested by others and 
has seemed good to me also, " having perfect understanding of 
that way," that it might be a means of usefulness, and perhaps 



12 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



a source of consolation, or even an humble guide to those 
who may come after us in the same rough path, or who may 
be at this moment, grappling with the same rude difficulties to 
see that " the fiery trial has happened" to others before them, 
and that a goodly " cloud of witnesses," still panting at the 
goal, are looking on them with affectionate sympathy, as they 
run the same race from which we are now resting, and have 
their eye on the same invaluable prize which we have grasped. 



CHAPTER II. 



TRADITION. 



It was enough to attach my young heart to the Presbyterian 
religion, that my mother, besides possessing in a high degree 
the most amiable and striking virtues of her sex, was formed 
in that religion to an elevated piety ; that from her my mind 
had received these early religious inclinations which it can 
never loose ; and that her flesh was resting in unclouded hope 
of a blessed resurrection. True, I was a child too young to 
know the nature of my loss, when I lost my mother; but never 
shall that mother's prayer pass away from my memory ; never 
shall her tear dry away from my sight ; never shall her hand 
be lifted from my brow, as she laid it there to bless me ; never 
shall I forget the pleasing task she assigned me, as the little 
bearer of her basket and its burdens at her side in her alms- 
giving visits to the poor ; never shall I lose from memory the 
little sanctuary, whither she often resorted with her child ; and 
where her soul soared upward and taught mine to follow; 
and, until death shall restore me to her, I shall feel her influ- 
ence, and, for aught I know, enjoy the defence and succor of 
her spirit, hovering about me still. My venerable father, too, 
for half a century, had been a prudent and efficient minister 
of Presbyterianism ; had, in the phraseology of that school, 
" dedicated me in baptism," and admitted me when yet a child 
to " the ordinance of the Lord's Supper ;" had by much exer- 



14 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



tion expensively educated me ; and had laid on me his hands, 
imparting the commission to bless the people and to preach 
the gospel and administer the sacraments as Presbyterians 
hold them. And few will find it in their hearts to censure me,' 
if I shall here confess, that, when other and graver obstacles 
had given way before the force of truth, there yet remained 
this, which flesh and blood could not willingly profane, and 
found it no light matter to surmount ; that the guide of my 
youth, now " old and well- stricken in years," might " go down 
with sorrow to the grave," if he should hear that his son had 
abjured the religion of his ancestors. 

With that homage which parents such as mine seldom fail to 
command from their children, I could not for a moment doubt, 
so long as I yet " thought as a child, and understood as a 
child," that it was my duty to believe exactly as they had 
believed before me. And far be it from me to condemn this 
feeling, now that I have " become a man." If the command- 
ment to " honor thy father and thy mother" be imperative, He 
who scarcely takes things temporal into the account, can 
hardly be supposed to have forbidden us to honor them, by 
embracing and defending their religion. It is unquestionably 
the original design of Providence, that this instinctive, and 
therefore clivinely implanted, veneration for our parents' faith ; 
a wise and holy instinct, which Cain first violated and Esau 
next ; should have its application, not only to the Church in 
her perfection, where the case suggests no difficulty ; but also 
to those forms of religion, which, although, we call them de- 
fective, we rejoice to hope may be radically Christian. Nor 
do we feel free to limit even here the application of the prin- 
ciple ; but we believe it to be as truly, although less obviously, 
wise and salutary, even when employed in the transmission of v 
the faith of the Mohammedan, or the Socinian, or the Pagan, 
or the J ew. For, if the children of such were not trained in 
the religion of then parents, they would grow up to manhood 



TRADITION. 



15 



without those ideas of accountability and retribution, which 
lie at the foundation of moral improvement and restraint. As 
we say of " the powers that be/' that any government what- 
ever is better than none, because its very existence affords a 
basis for progress and improvement ; so we say that any reli- 
gion whatever, Turk, Jew, or Heathen, is unspeakably better 
than none, because it makes man a creature of hope, and pre- 
serves the idea of accountability and law. Few, indeed, 
would be willing to see the experiment, if it could possibly be 
made, of severing the Mohammedan or Pagan from the teach- 
ing and religion of his parents, and of letting loose on earth, 
whole nations of Africans, or Turks, or Hindoos, without the 
conception of a God or of a future life. I need not extend 
this reasoning to the Atheist, until the question be settled, 
whether there has ever been this monster among men destitute 
of the first fundamental instinct of humanity ; and until the 
Atheist should be willing, which the pretended Atheist is 
never, to initiate his children into the arcana and the conse- 
quences of his faith. 

As it is then the duty of the parent to hold his own religion 
infallible, until he shall have seen convincing proof of its falla- 
ciousness, so is it equally the obligation of the child to hold 
as inviolable the religion of his parent ; his best friend under 
heaven ; one who would not " for bread give him a stone, nor 
for an egg a scorpion" — until he shall, at the maturity of rea- 
son, have encountered overwhelming demonstration, or at least 
satisfactory proof, of some fatal flaw or falsehood in the sys- 
tem. And when Christians shall be again " of one mind and 
of one heart ;" shall " eat the same spiritual meat, and drink 
the same spiritual drink ;" shall acknowledge one baptism into 
one body, and with " one mouth" confess " one faith that 
faith shall be perpetuated, as once it was, from sire to son, 
through the happy and unbroken ages of millenial blessedness, 
to which we are taught to look exultingly forward. And al- 



16 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



though this instinctive and inviolable rule of entailing a par- 
ticular faith, may work inconveniently, and often disastrously, 
in these days, when there be creeds many, and baptisms many, 
yet it is not to be set aside, except for the most serious and 
weighty reasons, to be cautiously considered in each particular 
case ; for " from the beginning it was not so ;" and, in hap- 
pier days to come, the working of this very rule shall bring it 
to pass, that " all thy children shall be taught of God," and 
an unsullied faith and worship shall be entailed from generation 
to generation. Thus it is, that the laws of nature, grace, and 
instinct, have all been intended to cover vast circles of time, 
and to accomplish a vast preponderance of good, and are not 
to be suspended on account of any local and short-lived incon- 
veniences that may result. As the wind must breathe, and 
the sun go on, the lightning play, and the volcano continue to 
blaze, the rains descend, and the rivers flow, and the ocean 
roll, and all nature keep in motion, to accomplish vast benefi- 
cient results, regardless of the partial evils that here and there 
may incidentally occur ; so, without the necessity of tracing 
out the parallel, must the laws ordained for our religious 
nature, whether they come from revelation or from instinct, be 
implicitly obeyed. 

Nay, we go farther and assert, that while the religion of 
tradition is the only religion of which childhood is capable, it 
is, almost to an equal extent, the only religion that we receive 
in manhood. Not more incapable is the pious child of demon- 
strating that the adorable Jesus, at whose name he bows and 
in whose name he prays, is both God and man, and must be 
God and man if He would lay his hand on both and reconcile 
the two, than older Christians for the most part are incapable 
of settling the canon of Scripture, or of establishing the fact, 
that the Scriptures have been faithfully preserved in their 
original tongues, or have been duly rendered in the received 
translations ; although upon these facts, and others equally 



TRADITION. 



17 



beyond their reach, they build the blessed hope of everlasting 
life. 

Nay, this principle is one of still wider range. Our know- 
ledge, on nearly all subjects, is the simple knowledge of tra- 
dition. The results in the whole circle of the sciences, and 
the facts in the whole field of literature, and the occurrences 
of every-day life, are received on tradition, or the word of 
others. Thus the child at school is the passive recipient of 
traditions. He believes, not only in innumerable facts, and 
nistories beyond his sphere of observation ; but he believes in 
facts, that his own observation would go far to contradict — 
that the earth is a sphere, although he sees it as a plane — and 
that the sun does not rise and set, although his eyes assure him 
that it does. He believes that an eclipse will occur to-mor- 
row, although he cannot understand the stupendous calcula- 
tions that furnish the result ; he believes that there are a thou- 
sand countries, rivers, seas, and cities that he has never seen ; 
and every event anterior to his birth, and every fact of which 
he has not been personally witness, he must and does receive 
on the testimony of tradition. He who would receive nothing 
on tradition must be without ideas, except as he acquires them 
in common with the brutes : carry the principle into religion, 
and he is an infidel and Atheist. Unless we could have lived 
from the times of Christ, and through all the succeeding ages 
from the Apostles down, we could not so much as know, that 
we have the scriptures as they were then given to the Church. 

When, therefore, I have said that mine was the faith of tra- 
dition ; a tradition that I justly venerated, because it came 
from my parents to me, as it had done from theirs to them — 
but a tradition that I have since discovered to be not very ven- 
erable for its years — I do not repudiate, but mean most dis 
tinctly to sanction the principle ; a principle, which, if from 
the first days of Christianity it had been, sacredly and without 

2* 



18 LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



interruption, followed, would have found universal Christen- 
dom at this moment " of one heart and of one mind." 

But as we have often remarked, that persons who pretend 
to have discovered the defectiveness of all creeds, and have 
made the high and flattering resolve to take the Bible as the 
expression of their faith, and with a sort of unwritten, unset- 
tled, eclective and ever-varying creed, made up of shreds and 
patches from the creeds around them ; or, as we have some- 
times seen the teachers of religion, dissatisfied with all the 
existing churches, as though " the gates of hell " had equally 
prevailed against them all, broaching some new organization, 
or some inorganic spiritual brotherhood, which was presently, 
like Aaron's rod, to swallow up all others, but which after 
gathering some " itching ears " around it, shortly became but 
another of the innumerable " churches," that, like the dust 
of Egypt, are " found in all our borders ;" so it is worthy 
of notice that greater practical sticklers for tradition, a tra- 
dition too of the most dangerous sort, the tradition of a 
mere yesterday, are nowhere to be found, than are every day 
met with, in the very churches and sects that declaim with 
lugubrious piety against it. And, as those teachers, who are 
constantly getting dissatisfied with all extant churches, or 
rather with those in which their own lot has fallen, and find 
something to complain of in them all, and profess to have left 
all " sects ;" sometimes with the preposterous dream that all 
will presently fall in with them ; cannot for their lives perceive, 
that they are only setting up themselves another " sect," which 
will by and by be right glad to get into a corner, dignified 
with the recently repudiated name of " church ;" or, as those 
pious souls, women not less than men, " seven women," it may 
be, " at the skirts of one man," who " have thrown away all 
human creeds," cannot for the life of them understand, that 
the result of their " comparing spiritual things with spiritual," 
has been to invent with overbearing positiveness a new human 



TRADITION. 



19 



creed, perhaps unwritten, and all the more dangerous for that ; 
so the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Quaker, the Sectarian 
in general, cannot at all perceive, that while professing to 
reject tradition, he is in fact the most rigid traditionist to be 
found on earth. The young Quakeress is compelled to swal- 
low, as amicably as her years will allow her, the traditions of 
" mother Eunice and grandmother Lois," even to the gloss 
upon her hair, the shape of her bonnet, and the pinning of her 
shawl ; and the Quaker boy comes up to manhood, with the 
traditions as he received them from his father, and the father 
from broad-brim ancestors before him, even to the curves and 
angles of his coat, and the wearing of his hat in meeting ; 
while all the little ones preserve the traditions of the parents, 
even to the crucifying of the English tongue, in the everlast- 
ing jargon of thee-and-thou. In vain the boy remonstrates, 
" Why, Father, thee is a pronoun of the second person, and in 
the objective case ; and commands is a verb in the third per- 
son, requiring the nominative ; yet thee commands me to violate 
the first rule of grammar." The father finds it quite satisfac- 
tory to answer, " What has grammar to do with religion ? O, 
son, we live in degenerate times ! Thee had a great deal bet- 
ter violate a hundred rules of grammar, than one tradition of 
the Church." How fortunate it is for some religions, and 
especially for such as originated, and could have originated^ 
only in a wild fanaticism, that there is such a thing as tra- 
dition ! How long would Quakerism live without it ? 

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the Presbyterian, the 
Methodist, the Baptist, and all the host of them. Who, in 
times past, has more rigidly enforced traditions, creeds and 
catechisms on their children, than Presbyterians ? For my 
own part, before I knew the difference between the nominative 
and the objective cases, I was a sincere believer that " the 
decrees of God are his eternal purpose, whereby, according to 
the counsel of his own will, he hath, for his own glory, foreor- 



20 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



dained whatsoever comes to pass." I never in my life met 
with but one consistent anti-traditionist ; a good-natured Bap- 
tist preacher, who undertook to bring his children up unbi- 
assed as well as unbaptized ; that on coming to the years of 
discretion, they might-investigate the conflicting claims of the 
Shaster and the Bible, and choose between Confucius and 
Christ, and settle the triple crown, yet in dispute, between 
Pius the Fourth and Calvin the First. But the worthy man 
soon grew tired of his consistency, and the unbaptized urchins 
had hardly got into their teens, before he discovered that 
" bodily exercise profitteth a little," (see marginal reading,) and 
by such exercise as the saints of the middle ages called Fla- 
gellantes or whippers, practised for godly discipline, the good 
minister found it quite necessary and highly edifying to in 
oculate his boys with somewhat of the virus of tradition 

The truth is, that the religion of tradition is universal. We 
see it everywhere. The principle is never violated. The 
Mohammedan, of every sect ; the Pagan, of every caste, the 
Papist, of every order ; the Jew, of every shape and form ; 
all, equally with the true Catholic, transmit their religions in 
genealogical descent from sire to son, by a hereditary sequitur. 
And we repeat, that we find no fault with the principle on 
which this fact depends. We have seen good results from it 
already. And when " the glorious things that are spoken of 
Zion" shall " begin to* come to pass," we look for it, by that 
prerogative whereby it now perpetuates both good and evil, to 
bequeath from age to age, in a millenium whose years no man 
can number, still " better things than these." 

If then the abstract principle be so important, of what 
serious concern to every thoughtful parent must it be, to 
establish himself for his children's sake, in the current of a pure 
and safe and, if possible, unchangeable tradition ! Before I 
became a Churchman, I had become a parent ; and as I looked, 
first on the unruffled faces of my children ; and then on the 



TRADITION. 



m 



sea of clashing sects and creeds all claiming to be Christian ; 
to-day noisily and fiercely jostling each other, and to-mor- 
row sinking into oblivion again ; now startling entire com- 
munities by the phenomena of a violent galvanic life, and 
lapsing once more as suddenly into silence and inertness; oh, 
many is the sigh I have ejaculated for a heritage to leave them, 
that should give some promise that it would not pass away 
with " every wind of doctrine ;" and often have I felt a sad- 
dening, sickening of the heart, at the destiny that seemed 
inevitably to await them ; in a church, whose actual con- 
dition in this country, and whose history in every other, gave 
me little reason to hope, that, however pure in my day, it would 
continue to be so in theirs ; and out of the only church that 
seemed to possess the elements of perpetuity ; the only church 
that history had proven to be conservative of our holy faith ! 
Sad and still sadder grew my thoughts. I knew that if I 
should live and die a Presbyterian, so in all human probability 
would they ; whatever Presbyterian might come to mean 
hereafter ; for I saw that it continually changed its meaning, 
and I had more than once in England been mistaken for a 
Unitarian, because I had announced myself a Presbyterian. 
In short, could I feel satisfied or justified, in that hour when 
the things of Christ and of his church, and of eternity and our 
immortal part, assume their just magnitude in the eyes of men, 
to leave these children to the mercies of a sect, four-fifths 
of which, as a future page of this narrative will show, have 
become already, and with amazing facility and concert, Arian, 
Socinian, Neologian, or Pantheistical ; and the only pure rem- 
nant of which has, under my own eyes, abjured the exalted 
view once taken in her own Confessions, of the ministry and 
sacraments as essential to the preservation of the more essen- 
tial faith, and is rapidly declining into cheerless, intellectual 
theories, and has been rent within my own brief memory into 
a hundred schisms ? Should I not be better satisfied, when 



22 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



looking on my little ones for the last time in life, to com- 
mend them to the nursing of a Holy Mother, that would 
enforce only the simple and sufficient creeds, which preserved 
the church's unity, so long as unity existed ; and that would 
protect and perpetuate those creeds by liturgies, possessing 
some mysterious charm, whereby she binds her children from 
age to age in mutual and indissoluble union ? 

It may seem singular that this view of the subject should 
have occurred to me so forcibly. But, entertaining it, I could 
not hesitate ; and with the instincts of parental love — though 
resolutely resisting, and scarcely conscious of, the slightest 
tendency toward that church myself — and at a moment when 
I fully expected to spend my own remaining days in a filial 
adherence to the communion in which I was born; seven 
years before I entered the church, I submitted my children, 
although " secretly for fear of the" synagogue and elders, to 
Episcopal baptism; that they might hereafter the more readily 
glide into a church, which at this time I regarded as having no 
other advantages above " the fair daughters of the Reforma- 
tion," than in her manifest and tried conservatism, by virtue 
chiefly of her noble and unalterable liturgy. 

One design of relating this circumstance, has been, to give 
the reader some just idea of the anxieties through which a*n 
inquirer must pass ; and to teach the unreflecting that a con- 
version to Episcopacy, in certain circumstances, is not likely 
to be the result of caprice, or of blind or sudden impulse. 
For myself, so long as stern conscience allowed me to remain 
a Presbyterian ; so long as my leanings toward Episcopacy 
involved, or appeared to involve, no fundamental principle, but 
were at most the suggestings of taste, policy, expediency, I 
was content to abide in the communion wherein I had been born. 
But knowing the difficulty and the danger of breaking asunder 
the tie that binds one to the religion of his childhood, I deter- 
mined to make it easier for my children to glide out of the 



TRADITION. 



23 



accidental religion of their father, into the church that he even 
then distinctly regarded, in the present state of the world and 
of human nature, to be sufficiently, and more than any other, 
and after ample trial, the conservator, amidst the world's 
changes and chances, of " the faith once delivered to the 
saints." For the same reason, it was my determination, 
regardless of the inconveniences to myself from such a 
course, to recommend to them, in due time afterward, the 
religion in which by true-hearted clergymen of the Church of 
England I had caused them to be baptized. 

And now the reader, having seen my children " received 
into the congregation of Christ's flock," will not be surprised 
to find the parent envying his children's lot, and, by more 
painful stages making progress; as he did for the seven fol- 
lowing years — toward the same result. 



CHAPTER III. 



APOLOGY. 

In my seventeenth year, I became a member of the theo- 
logical seminary at Princeton ; a village widely and justly 
renowned for its academical and theological learning. The 
Episcopal liturgy had probably, up to that time, never grated 
on the atmosphere, that lay in homogeneous repose, within a 
circumference of thirty miles. A priest, all dressed in white, 
as one uprisen from the grave of Popery, had never appeared 
to frighten the quiet villagers out of their propriety. The 
faces around us — the traditions around us — the very sepulchres 
around us — the strangers who came among us — the pious and 
venerated men, whose shoes we felt unworthy to bear, and 
under whose observant eye was passing, as we felt, our every 
thought — all were Presbyterian " after the most straitest sect." 
And what was I, at sixteen years of age, that I should enter- 
tain a doubt, that the men, whom there it was our privilege to 
know and to revere, had sifted their facts, and considered well 
their premises, and reached by the most cautious reasoning 
their conclusions ? To me it would have seemed little less 
than parricide to have resisted the direction they were giving 
to my mind. 

Being of an inquisitive turn myself, I would have pursued 
a doubt on any important alleged fact, to any extremity. But 
being also in my mental bias, both happily and unhappily, 



APOLOGY. 



25 



confiding and disposed to faith, and having been educated 
strictly a traditionist, I must confess, whether to my discredit 
or not, that, during a residence of more than three years at 
the seminary, I swallowed every fact and dogma as most 
wholesome truth, " asking no questions for conscience sake ;" 
and, with a credulity that would have gained me laurels in a 
school of Loyola, I never for a moment doubted the essential 
truth of the prevailing system. 

One exception I must briefly mark — as it is the key to much 
that is to follow in this narrative. I did, at one time, deeply 
doubt the lawfulness of infant baptism. The doubt did not 
last long ; its consequences will last forever. A thorough 
investigation dispelled every shadow of misgivings that nature, 
revelation, and antiquity sustained the practice. But how to 
reconcile this fact with the popular idea of regeneration ; or 
how it should be lawful to baptize an infant before it had 
given signs of a spiritual birth, when I was taught to believe 
that the very design of baptism was to proclaim that birth 
before men and angels ; was a problem that haunted me, as 
the reader will see, both then and afterwards. 

While my companions in study, either older in years, or 
more inquisitive, or less confiding than myself, were rash 
enough now and then to hint their dissent upon some point of 
merely metaphysical importance, there was certainly one sub- 
ject on which no one ventured to suggest a doubt. During 
my long residence at that " school of the prophets," I am not 
able to say with a clear conscience, that I ever laid my eyes 
on a volume — a line — a syllable, in defence of Episcopacy. 
This may appear strange, but it is not inexcusable. Episco- 
pacy came up of course among the conflicting forms of Chris- 
tianity, but was summarily disposed of, to make room for some 
more plausible or more important theme. Everything else 
" came into our assemblies," as " a man, with a gold ring, in 
goodly apparel," while Episcopacy stood there as " a poor 



26 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



man in vile raiment/' or as a woman not distant of kin to 
" the mother of abomination," and as an Episcopalian seemed 
in our limited horizon to be a rara avis in terris, and his sect 
unpopular and unimportant, and inevitably destined before the 
rising lights of Jerome and Augustine to melt like snow be- 
neath concentric suns, or doomed more certainly, should it 
prove more obstinate, to be ridden over rough-shod by a more 
popular religion ; and as we felt also sure that it could never 
thrive in a republic, we agreed that it was sufficiently honored 
in receiving at our hands the little notice that it got. " The 
sect is a small part of the christian world. In this land it 
is and will continue to be, among the smallest of the tribes of 
Israel ; its ministers are few in comparison with those of other 
denominations ; its ministers are also comparatively few, and 
in point of talent, learning, piety and moral worth, not eminent 

above all others — It is at variance with the spirit of 

this age and of this land. This is an age of freedom, and 
men will be free. The religion of forms is not adapted to 
the free movement, the enlarged views, the varying plans of 
this age. It makes a jar on American feelings. It will not 
be tolerated by this community." So says Mr. Barnes, the 
serenity of whose dreams has been disturbed, if we are 
rightly informed, by the tumbling of this barley-cake into the 
hosts that lie round about as grasshoppers, smiting in its pro- 
gress his own particular tent on Washington Square, and 
eliciting more than once, in that unanswered ad hominem of 
his to " the evangelical party in the Episcopal church," the 
lamentation, that "Episcopalians are everywhere endeavoring 
to win [we should have said, are everywhere winning,'] the 
young from the churches of their fathers." 

Although I was, and may say it without boasting, to an in- 
tense degree, a student, and my lamp at night often the last 
to be extinguished ; and though, in the various departments of 



APOLOGY. 



27 



study, I was " not a whit behind the chiefest" of my com- 
panions, in giving satisfaction to my teachers, as their own 
obliging testimonials may show ; yet one who has any know- 
ledge of seminary life, or of the endless range of theological 
investigation ; or one who has ever seen how impetuously the 
student must be hurried forward from one topic to another, 
without the possibility of pausing ; will readily understand 
how it may have happened, that one young as myself ; the 
youngest of a hundred and twenty brethren ; should not have 
employed his time in poring over the defences of a religion, 
which seemed then to have scarcely an existence in the land, 
and which it appeared impossible that the republican should 
tolerate, or the formalist himself be able long to endure, and 
which " the spiritually-minded," even among Episcopalians, 
would by and by instinctively and loathingly repudiate. By 
referring to copious notes of lectures, which I had a facility 
of taking with great accuracy, I observe that we were em- 
ployed from December the twenty-seventh to the seventeenth 
of January on the topics in question ; that is, deducting the 
portion of this interval allotted to other duties, we were em- 
ployed upon Episcopacy altogether, about three days of con- 
tinuous time. How had we the opportunity to dwell on this 
silly question of " the washing of cups and pots and brazen 
vessels," in the space of three weeks, when all the other, and 
to us higher departments of study, were at the same time 
hungrily pressing upon our attention with the expectation 
that we should be equally proficient in them all ? 

Neither did I lay down Episcopacy, as I did most other 
subjects, with the intention of a deliberate investigation at 
some future time ; but grudging it the little notice it had got, 
among what seemed to be " the weightier matters of the law," 
and fastening tenaciously upon several facts or points, which, 
if their verity might be depended on, were certainly enough to 



28 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



silence all the Episcopal batteries in creation — and I was 
not one to question the accuracy of traditions from these, 
who, to me, "sat in Moses' seat" — I laid the subject down, 
supposing, that in parting with it here, I had done with it 
for ever. 

Besides this routine of study, which allowed us scarcely 
respite for our daily meals, the " revivals of religion,' 7 that 
broke out at the time in every section of the Presbyterian 
Church; exhibiting a wonderful mixture of good and evil, 
and accompanied by unusual and strange developments ; were 
enough, with a temperament less ardent than mine, to absorb 
one class of energies and sympathies ; while the theologica 
disputes, that like a desolating flood were swelling in every 
direction to a most formidable height, and which resulted a 
little later in violent disruptions and in the addition of another 
large batch of sects to the already portentous list, were suf- 
ficient to engross the leisure moments of a young divine, in 
whose eyes, unread in history and unused to such phenomena 
" the ends of the world had come upon us," and heaven and 
earth were mingling in the strife. 

I permit myself to give prominence to these facts, as an 
apology (I am compelled to use the word,) for these, who have 
come out of the Babel — let me not call it Babylon — of sects 
and schisms, into the quiet home provided by the church 
Recantation is never a pleasing task. Even on the side of 
truth and goodness, it has its bleeding sacrifices. And we 
think that we lighten the harsh terms of penance to which we 
are condemned, by thus accounting for our having once con 
scientiously held opinions that we now conscientiously repu 
diate. If we had held our opinions on the Episcopal claim, 
believing it to be a subject of grave importance ; or, if we had 
adopted them in circumstances that had allowed a fair oppor- 
tunity for investigation; we should not have deserved the 



APOLOGY. 



29 



indulgence that we now presume to ask. But, so long as we 
regarded it as a question of the very least importance, the 
other engrossing topics of inquiry did not, either de merito or 
de facto allow us to pause. ♦ 

It is but fair that this should be borne in mind, that we may 
be spared the objurgations which we sometimes hear, as though, 
in a moment of caprice, we had changed well-formed opinions, 
and might possibly hereafter change again ; as though the 
vibration that brought us into Episcopacy, might, some day 
swing with us into Popery, or back again on the other side, to 
a position farther from the central truth than we were before. 
And yet among the Three Hundred Ministers to whom I have 
alluded, and among the thousand and thousand late lay con- 
verts to Episcopacy, I have never known of any such relapse, 
except of a Baptist in a recent instance in Ohio. I have 
known Episcopalians, baptised and educated in the Church, 
although I must suspect not educated on church principles, 
to make the said transitions to Romanism and Dissent ; but, 
personally, I do not know an individual, denied a birth and 
training in the church, and who has come to " this Mount 
Zion " at his peril, that has afterward lapsed into either of 
these errors. That such cases exist, we believe on the testi- 
mony of an excellent Bishop who has " taken pains to in- 
quire," and has proclaimed the fact ; and that such cases would 
exist, we should have thought not at all unlikely, especially if, 
of every two hundred and eighty-five persons ordained in the 
church, as was the case under Bishop Griswold, of Massa- 
chusetts, two hundred and seven are from other denominations, 
and if, as some have computed, two -thirds at least of the 
Episcopal clergy throughout the land, were once dissenters by 
their baptism or their education.* For, without undertaking 

* C{ It is a curious fact," says Bishop De Lancey, in a Conventional Ad- 
dress, which has appeared in a number of our church papers, " that as far 



30 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



to extenuate their error, or wishing to become the apologist 
for these mistaken brethren, let us not use this sword against 
them, lest even in a bishop's hands, we find it a two-edged 
blade, that may wound in a different quarter from the one in- 
tended. 

For, to tell the plain truth, the convert from sectarianism, 
whose conversion has been one of either his head or his heart, 
may well feel disappointed at finding the practical condition 
of the Church so vitally at variance with its theories. His 
conversion has been the result of long inquiry and anxious 
struggles. He has been converted to Christianity as ex- 

as I can learn, most all the clerical seceders in this country, from the 
Church to Romanism, have been originally educated and trained in bodies 
not Protestant Episcopal. The following is the result of my inquiries on 
the subject : — " 

CLERGYMEN. 

Names. Dioceses. iJtfectiln. bought up as, 

Rev. Virgil H. Barber, Jr. - - - New York - 1815, Congregationalist. 
" Virgil H. Barber, Sen. - - Connecticut 1815, Congregationalist. 

" John Kewley, New York - 1816, Methodist. 

" Pierce Connelly, Mississippi - 1836, Presbyterian. 

" J. Roosevelt Bayley, - - - New York - 1842, Episcopalian. 

" Henry Major, Pennsylvania 1846, Methodist. 

" Nathaniel A. Hewitt, Maryland - 1846, Congregationalist. 

" Edgar P. Wadhams, New York - 1846, Presbyterian. 

" Wm. H. Hoyt, Vermont - - 1846, Congregationalist. 

Candidates for Orders. 

Mr. Clarence Walworth, W. New York 1845, Presbyterian. 

«« Benjamin B. J. McMasters, New York - 1845, Ref. Scotch Pres. 
" Putnam, North Carolina 1845, Congregationalist. 

To this statement of the Bishop I beg most respectfully to add, thai 
" as far as I can learn," but one of the twelve apostates here named, was 
ever a dissenting minister; and that one was the Rev. Mr. Kewley, who 
having been baptised in the Church, was in boyhood seduced by the Jesuits 
from his parents in England, and was educated at St. Omer's, in France, 
(his parents not knowing where he was, but only receiving anonymous as- 



APOLOGY. 



81 



pounded by the Prayer-Book — a theory symmetrical, sublime, 
satisfactory. He has had little opportunity to discover the 
practical Puritanism that has reduced the church at so many 
points to a level, and into feeble and fruitless competition, 
with the sects around her ; and can we wonder that when he 
finds himself in the church, still hampered and harassed by 
the same teachings, practices, and spirit, that he had imagined 
had been left forever behind him, he should in a moment of 
unlooked-for disappointment, throw himself with a desperation 
analogous to that of the weak-minded suicide, disappointed 
in the ideal object of his admiration and his love, into the 
arms of a more conservative system ; conservative, although 
it be of error and wrong, as well as of truth and right ? If 
the Church were actually the Church held up to the world in 
her Prayer-Book and in the writings of her great divines, the 
men who have thus been driven to a desperate deed, would 
more probably have been ready to lay down their lives in her 
and for her. We may be allowed to say, therefore, that we 
have felt it to be somewhat unkind, when one of these con- 
verts has happened to do something not quite churchmanlike, 
to attribute the error to a residuum of the old leaven ; while 
the eyes of the veriest neophyte could see that the same 
errors, or errors still greater, and departures still more serious 

surances that he was doing well the while,) and after a stealthy escape to 
England, became a Protestant, and a Methodist Minister. On coming to 
America, he entered the church, and became Rector of St. George's 
Parish in New York city, which he afterwards resigned, shortly following 
this step by his return to Europe and to the Romish communion. More- 
over, without being at much "pains to inquire," we ascertain that the 
churchborn apostates to Rome in this country, bear quite their proportion 
to the above lists among the clergy, and that in England the proportion is 
beyond comparison greater. Our only object is, to check these unnecessary 
and invidious distinctions, and that for no other reason than that they seem 
to us likely to check the progress, as they contradict the spirit, of a 
Catholic-hearted church. 



32 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



from the canons, liturgy, principles, and spirit of the church, 
were more numerously and more strikingly perpetrated by 
those whose better fortune should have taught them better 
manners toward their lawful mother. 

It has been the occasion of satire to the Sectarian, and of 
pleasantry even to the Churchman, that the professed convert 
to the church of God should betray any earnestness in the 
cause, which he has at such peril espoused. For myself, al- 
though the feeling has never been officiously or offensively 
obtruded, because it has never been obtruded at all, upon the 
notice of others, and has been sometimes even studiously re- 
pressed, yet I am not ashamed to plead guilty to that sense 
of holy satisfaction, which only a great sacrifice to conscience 
can impart ; and of gratitude, which only a great benefit con- 
ferred, can enkindle ; and of comfort, which only a blessing 
long desired, and inestimable in itself, can bring ; and, for 
one, I am content to put my hand, while living, to the senti- 
ment which a noble son and father of our Church inscribed on 
all his actions, and again, for the thousandth and the last 
time, subscribed, with his dying hand, Pro Ecclesia Dei! 
Pro Ecclesia Dei ! My answer to the dissenter is, Who but 
a Churchman, that has tasted the quiet delights of the sanc- 
tuary, can appreciate the church's excellence ? My vindica- 
tion to the Churchman is, Who but the soul that has been 
" tossed up and down like a locust," upon " the winds of doc- 
trine" and the sea of sects, can understand the mazes, the 
dangers, the undercurrents, and the disasters, of Sectarianism ? 
Sectarians, you know nothing of the church's blessings ! 
Churchmen, you know nothing of Sectarianism's mischiefs ! 

The young churchman, as a theological student, has this 
advantage over the sectarian ; that, besides his being tutored 
to a system better adapted to bind its sons in loyal attach- 
ment to itself, the subject of church order, in his course of 
study, is so prominently kept before his mind, and so assidu- 



APOLOGY. 



33 



ously followed out in its bearings, that he acts earlier in life 
under a clearer apprehension of the subject; and, if he have 
been but moderately attentive to the question in dispute, is not 
very likely to retract the results at which he has arrived. But 
it is right to recollect, that the case of the Sectarian is other- 
wise. His course of study is assigned, and every hour of his 
time so filled, as nearly to exclude, and certainly to force into 
a corner, the whole question of Episcopacy, and the still 
more vital questions, liturgical, catholic, and sacramental, 
that with the Episcopacy, as all experience teaches, are to 
stand or fall. Hence the phenomenon, arguing indirectly, 
but conclusively, for Episcopacy, that, in face of the out- 
cry and the odious nicknames of the day, invented to arrest 
the wholesome reaction, hundreds of dissenting teachers, 
in England as well as in America, and thousands of their 
followers, are flocking back to the ark, from which, in an 
evil hour, they went out, seeking rest upon a turbulent and 
dangerous sea ; and that in this country alone, within the 
memory of man, Three Hundred Ministers, with a correspond- 
ing number of adherents, have returned to the ancient fold ! 

If I may repeat what seems to be the only explanation of 
this fact, it is, that the church student is in little danger of 
meeting with new suggestions upon church polity ; whereas, 
the dissenting minister is in continual peril of encountering 
new facts, or the refutation of the facts on which he has been 
accustomed to rely. And this defection from sectarianism 
must continue to annoy our " separated brethren," so long as 
the high prerogative of the Church, as the visible Body of 
Christ, witnessing His Word, perpetuating His Presence, and 
imparting His Forgiveness and His Grace, shall continue to 
be " privily thrust out." Let it also be remembered, that in 
subsequent life, the pressure of domestic avocations, the limit- 
ed access to books, the res angusta domi, and the absorbing 
nature of parochial engagements, as effectually exclude it 



34 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



from the attention of the student, when promoted to the pas- 
toral life ; so that nothing but a seeming accident, or the ill- 
working of an intolerable system, is likely, in the first in- 
stance, to rouse his inquiries, or send him to the tomes of the 
Fathers and the fountain-heads of information. 

Because these facts have not been allowed a hearing, the 
"new convert" has been regarded sometimes with a certain 
feeling of distrust ; and attempts, that look like playing back 
into the hands of Dissenters, have been made, to make the 
period of probation, for those who have been dissenting min- 
isters, so burdensome, as effectually to exclude them from the 
priesthood of the Church. We might be led into some curious 
speculations, were we to pry into the motives for these at- 
tempts. Is it, that the Church, so lax in her discipline at other 
points, wishes to be understood as taking the high ground, 
that we have committed some sin almost unpardonable in 
having been dissenting teachers ? Or may it be, that in the 
judgment of some, we have perpetrated a most damning sin 
in abjuring communions, which are in their opinion, on all 
vital points, as much churches of Christ as the one we seek ? 
Have you ever known one in a hundred of these converts from 
sectarianism, to return to his " first love V Have you ever 
known one of them to apostatize to Rome, except in sadness 
and bitterness, at finding the living Church so flattered by 
its portrait in the Prayer- Bo ok, and by the pencils of her mas- 
ters ? Are they not in general, as firm, and filial, and obedient 
sons, though " coming from far," as those that have been 
" nursed at her side," and as " able to give a reason of the 
hope that is in them ?" But I mean not to argue. Take 
away those ministers at her altars who have been baptized or 
educated in dissent, and the Church in America will be left a 
widow indeed, with but little if anything more than her thirds 
for her portion. 

Right sorry am I to tell it in this place, that there are quar- 



APOLOGY. 



35 



ters, in which the unchurchmanlike, unscriptural, unchristian, 
uncatholic, and behind-the-age sentiment is familiarly uttered, 
that you would rather these dissenters should remain where 
they are ! Remain where they are ! I confess I do not un- 
derstand you. Remain where they are ! Is your Church the 
living representative of Christ on earth, and you would rather 
they should not be baptized into that body, and derive through 
it, " by that which every joint supplieth," their nourishment 
and growth unto everlasting life ? You pray incessantly, 
" Thy kingdom come," and yet you are startled at the first 
shaking of the dry bones, around you ! You say that your 
Church is destined to absorb all others, and yet, the moment 
the bright result begins to dawn, and wake you from your 
slumbers, you deprecate the spreading light, and cry, " Yet a 
little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to 
sleep!" 

I speak not for myself. For myself I have nothing to ask. 
I have not found the Church the step-mother that my former 
friends predicted, and my own fears foreboded. I have found 
fathers among her elders ; and among her sons I have found 
brothers ; and from her breasts I have drawn consolations, for 
the sacrifices I have made. Yet I remember the words of a 
judicious writer, that " men are but men, what room soever 
among men they hold." Nor do I forget the words of a 
friend, dropped by the way-side, a few hours before I received 
the grace of holy orders, that " you will find human nature in 
the Church, as well as out of it; you must expect to meet 
everywhere with narrow minds and pent-up hearts." To 
which I have only to add, that the mere fact of our abandon- 
ing systems, that some within the Church regard with so much 
tenderness, may in some instances subject us to the mistrust- 
ing glance, as it is an awkward thing to be explained by those 
who at the Church's altars act as the apologists of dissent 



36 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



and schism, and over the Church's walls reach down the left 
hand of fellowship to " the brethren without." 

My remarks look to the future, and, at the risk of incurring 
the rebuke, that " this one fellow came in to sojourn, and will 
needs be a judge," I cannot but confess, that it would be 
painful to see the Church — free as it is, and free as it ought 
to be preserved — legislating herself out of her own liberties, 
and inventing new and unnecessary hindrances to the enlarge- 
ment of her borders. " Much land remains to you to be pos- 
sessed." " The field is the world." If the dissenting teacher, 
applying for her orders, is not qualified for the responsibilities 
that they impose, then, though he be as old as Methuselah, 
use the Church's prerogative, and bid him away. But if he be 
ready with " the answer of a good conscience," then take all 
that come to you — for alas ! you have room for all — and 
ordain them, though they be young as Timothy, and though, 
like his, their fathers have been " Greek." " What God hath 
cleansed, that call not thou common." Take the word of 
one, whose word in the present case may not go for nought, 
that you need inflict no greater penance, than that which these 
men have suffered, in crossing " the great gulf fixed " between 
them and you. What is the policy of Rome ? What the policy of 
the Dissenter? Fas est ab hostedoceri — freely translated — learn 
a lesson from your neighbors. In days like these, when those 
who come to you must forsake the popular for the unpopular 
— must stem a breast-deep tide to reach you — must leave 
an unburied father, or an offended house, to follow you — must 
wear in no mean sense a crown of suffering and one of which 
for Christ's sake they are not ashamed — receive, as did Paul 
and Peter, all that come to you. Although, like Timothy, 
without our fault, we may not have been " of Israel, accord- 
ing to the flesh,".yet " from a child we have known the Holy 
Scriptures," and have loved, " though half in the speech of 



APOLOGY. 



37 



Ashdod," the faith that dwelt aforetime in our mothers and our 
grandmothers. 

Only let the Bishops see, that ministers from other com- 
munions, seeking orders in the Church, leave no room for the 
suspicions that codum, non animam mutant; and the Church 
may safely throw open her door. Her walls, the world over, 
and the world knows, are strong enough, and high enough : and 
if her gates be needlessly obstructed, those who would have en- 
tered, will go away wondering at the "grievous burdens" that 
your own scribes and lawyers " would not touch with one of 
their fingers." It was a fearful accusation, " Them that were 
entering in, ye hindered." Let the Church, that we believe to 
be " after the pattern of heavenly things," assert her prerogative, 
as " the mother of all living," and " travail," like her apostles, 
" the»second time " for her disaffected children, and do nothing 
to deserve the reproachful name that sectarians have given her, 
and with which, if my own experience may testify, they seek 
to deter their adherents from her bosom, as a noverca injusta. 

I am not ignorant of the discipline of the primitive Church 
toward those who returned to her from heresy and schism. 
Perhaps it is unfortunate that that discipline has been inter- 
rupted. But were it even in force, we might still without pre- 
sumption remind you, that we were sectarians by tradition, 
and not by election ; that few of us ever rejected any article 
of the Catholic Faith, as it is expressed in the ancient creeds ; 
and that, in encountering all the inconveniences and hardships 
of a conversion, we have done a penance that should satisfy 
the Church, and at which a Hindoo breaking caste would 
justly marvel. 

Perhaps few would be more ready than myself to bode 
danger from a sudden influx into the Church. I have seen 
disastrous consequences from the letting loose of Congrega- 
tionalists into the Pesbyterian communion — taking it by sur- 
prise, and cutting it adrift from its ancient moorings. It is 



38 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



notorious that her doctors have recently descended not only to 
Congregational mitigations of her faith, but to Congregational 
grounds in her defence — resorting, if I may give an example 
of recent and memorable date, to the silly hypothesis, urged 
formerly by Congregationalists against themselves, of a crew 
of Christians cast without the ministry and sacraments upon a 
desert island. And I know, that, when it was remarked in a 
circle of New School Divines, a few years ago, that a number 
of New England ministers were going into the Episcopal 
Church, a Congregational Doctor of Divinity, fresh from Ohio, 
replied, " I am glad of it ; they will revolutionize the Episcopal 
Church, as we have done the Presbyterian." And it may be, 
that now and then an adventurer may make his way into the 
Church, from carnal or mercenary motives, (although, where 
Dissent is " fat and well-liking " in the land, this can hardly be 
conceived,) and such to their new spouse may be forever com- 
mending and canonizing their first love. It may even be, that 
the Cincinnati Divine has not been entirely disappointed, in 
seeing here and there the revolutionary hand at work. But let 
it be remembered, that the gliding from one sect into another, 
is a very different thing from a submission to the Church. In 
one you cross the street ; in the other, a great gulf. One is a 
caprice ; the other a conversion. Besides, I need not remind 
the Episcopalian, that Episcopacy has guards, which Presby- 
tery has not — that Episcopacy has claims, which Presbytery 
has not — that Episcopacy has promises, which Presbytery has 
not — that Episcopacy has a destiny, which Presbytery has 
not — a destiny as catholic as the family of man — a destiny 
which she must inevitably fulfil, and can fulfil only by conver- 
sions as thick strown as " the drops of the morning dew." 
Either you must give up your high-sounding claim to be the 
Church of God, or every conversion must fill your heart with 
joy. Either you must not look for her future universality, and 
consequently must at once surrender her pretensions, and leave 



APOLOG-Y. 



39 



the undisputed field to Rome ; or, like Rome, you must keep 
vigils for her straitness, and jubilees for her extension. Leave 
not these waters teeming with living myriads, to the Roman 
fisherman, who will let down his net at the master's bidding, 
not fearing, like you, that " for the multitude of the fishes " his 
net will " break." Be ye not so like the brother in the field, 
who " was angry, and would not go in." " It was meet that 
we should make merry, and be glad ; for this thy brother was 
dead, and is alive again ; and was lost and is found." 



CHAPTER IV. 



PRINCETON. 

Between the years 1830 and 1840, on the deck of 
steamboat between the cities of Washington and Alexandria 
I remember to have met, for the first and only time in my life 

with the Reverend Mr. , an Episcopal clergyman, an 

one of three brothers " according to the flesh," who had them 
selves, as I was afterward informed, come " from without 
into the Church. It so happened, in the course of conversa 
tion, that this gentleman made some allusion to the hurried 
notice taken of the subject of Episcopacy in certain theolo 
gical schools, and hinted broadly that this was very much the 
case at Princeton. I do not recollect the reply that his re 
marks elicited, or whether I did not let them fall unnoticed 
into the Potomac ; but I have not forgotten the indignation 
that burned in my young heart, at what I regarded as an un- 
manly and unfounded imputation upon my church, my alma 
mater, and myself. 

Fortunately for me too, a few weeks before, on making 
my ministerial debut in the first Presbyterian Church in 
Washington, in the presence of President, Senators, and Ru- 
lers of the nation, the minister who " made " what is oddly 
but aptly termed " the long prayer," that is, the prayer be- 
fore the sermon, thought proper to introduce me to his audi- 
ence as " thy servant not yet nineteen years of age." For, 



PRINCETON. 



41 



although it was an extemporaneous error of more than a year, 
and intended to natter the vanity of a debutant, still, by not 
allowing me to forget that I was yet a boy, it may have done 
me service in restraining me, on this occasion, from giving 
utterance to a feeling like this : " Sir ! art thou a teacher in 
Israel, and knowest not yet the difference between the Gos- 
pel and the Church ; between externals and essentials ; be- 
tween the casket and the jewels ; between the net and the 
fishes ; between the shell and the kernel ; between the spirit 
and the body ; between the chaff and the wheat ; between 
the mere scaffolding and the glorious building ? " And cer- 
tainly, on this occasion, " discretion was the better part of 
valor ;" for had the young bachelor in divinity given way to 
his pugilistic impulses, he might have been sadly puzzled ; 
nay, I may fear, muzzled ; if the excellent clergyman had, in 
his mild way replied : " My dear young friend — you will ex- 
cuse me for reminding you again that you are young — would 
you deposit a jewel in a frail casket without a fastening? 
Would you expect to see the kernel come to maturity, if you 
should rend to tatters the protecting shell ? Would you think 
to detain on earth the spirit of one you loved, if you should 
neglect or divide the body it inhabited ? Would you, with a 
weak and broken net, expect, in all weathers and in all 
waters, to drag your fishes to the shore ? Would you tear off 
the " useless chaff" that God has thrown around the grain, 
and hope, when the sickle should be thrust in, to fill your gar- 
ner with the wheat ? Would you throw down the scaffolding, 
and expect to see the temple rear its bright pinnacles toward 
the sky? The jewel would perish without the casket, and 
the kernel without the shell ; the life would depart but for 
the body, and the fishes be lost but for the integrity of the 
net ; the wheat would die but for the chaff, the temple never 
rise but for the scaffolding, and the gospel pass away from 
the hearts of men but for the Church, its channel and its wit- 



42 



LOOKIXa FOR THE CHURCH. 



ness. You must, then, my young friend, find other simili- 
tudes from the objects around us to support your theory. 
Ask nature. Does she furnish the analogies you want?" But 
fortunately for the reputation of Princeton, as represented in 
her youthful graduate, I did not lay myself open the annihi 
lation to which this would have been but the playful prologue 

Although the clergyman thus encountered was justified in 
the allegation, that the time allotted to the subject of Episco- 
pacy, in certain schools, is unreasonably short ; for, if I mis- 
take not, he had been himself a pupil at Princeton, and now 
only " testified what he had seen ;" yet the young graduate 
flatters himself into the consciousness that he is amply mailed 
and equipped to confront a universe of mitres, and all the in- 
genuity and learning of the heads that wear them. As we 
made our rapid transit over the ground, my own mind fast- 
ened distinctly upon what appeared to be its more plausible 
pretensions, and at the same time upon what promised to be 
the annihilating sources of attack. Contenting myself with 
these leading and, as I thought, strong positions, which I 
shall presently enumerate, I was the subject of a mental pro- 
cess, resting strictly on tradition, and fairly reducible to the 
following syllogism : 

If what our Lecturer has drawn from the records of anti- 
quity be true, Episcopacy is a fraud. 

What our Lecturer has drawn from the records of anti- 
quity is true by every guarantee of honesty, learning and 
piety: 

Ergo, Episcopacy is a fraud. 
Or thus : 

Facts must settle this question : 
Our Professor has given us the facts : 
The question is therefore settled. 

The nature of the facts on which my young mind had 
seized, and on which it had as undaunted influence, as had the 



PRINCETON. 



43 



Hebrew stripling in " the smooth stones from the brook," 
may be inferred from the following examples, which I shall 
repeat in the form in which, for the most part, they were at 
that time presented to my imagination. 

I. Episcopacy is, in its structure, anti-republican, and in 
its spirit, hostile to human liberty ; in the pleasant places 
where our lot is fallen, we need not therefore fear its progress, 
nor concern ourselves about it. 

II. It is now conceded, that the official names of Bishop 
and Presbyter in the New Testament are of the same exact 
meaning ; therefore all Presbyters, or, which is the same 
thing, all Pastors are Bishops, and the setting of Bishops 
above Presbyters or Pastors is a usurpation and an anti- 
Christ. 

III. The apostles were but twelve, and their number was no 
more intended to be increased than that of the twelve tribes 
or the twelve constellations. The apostles saw the Lord, 
whom their pretended successors have not seen ; the apostles 
wrought miracles, which their pretended successors cannot 
show ; the apostles possessed individually the gift of inspira- 
tion, which their pretended successors, unless indirectly or 
collectively, do not even claim ; therefore their pretended suc- 
cessors are Apostati, non Apostoli ; Seductores, non Doctores ; 
Pilati, non Prelati — not Apostles, but apostates ; not Doctors, 
but seductors ; not prelates, but Pilates ! 

IV. Hilary declares that " In Egypt, even at this day [say, 
the end of the fourth century,] the Presbyters ordain in the 
Bishop's absence ; " and Jerome a writer of unbounded learn- 
ing, declares that Episcopacy was introduced " by degrees " 
into the Church; that at Alexandria even in his day, "not only 
the election, but the ordination of the Bishops was by the 
Presbyters themselves," and demands exultingly of the proud 
Bishop of Rome, " What does a Bishop, ordination excepted, 
that a Presbyter may not do ?" in other words, " what pre- 



44 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



rogative has a Bishop, ordination excepted, that a Presbyter 

has not ?" 

These will answer for specimens of the positions, on which, as 
a graduate in this department, I relied for all future emergen- 
cies; and these, together with a few other quotations from the 
Fathers to save appearances, and especially a modest remark 
of the great Bishop of Hippo respecting his order, extracted; 
by a more searching process than is known in alchymy, from 
the fifteen huge folios of Saint Augustine ; and also, the marvel- 
lous tradition we were taught, that " there is not one word in 
favor of Episcopacy to be found in the writings of the Fathers 
for the first three centuries ; " and that, if there were, " the 
Fathers are not to be trusted," and their records are no better 
than " old wives' fables ; " constituted the stripling's armor, as 
he came forth to meet " this uncircumcised Philistine." The 
Episcopal reader will readily understand the process, by 
which my mind was enabled afterward to perceive the irrele- 
vancy or the inconclusiveness of these and the like assump- 
tions ; and the reader, to whom it may appear strange that 
they should ever have lost with me then' force, may have his 
curiosity gratified by accompanying me a little farther in the 
story. 

But those, who are curious to remark such things will see, 
that I was all this while a Presbyterian by tradition, believing 
with a loyalist's — I might almost write it, Loyolisfs implicit- 
ness in the historical infallibility of my manuals and doctors. 
As yet, I had neither the motive nor the time to call in ques- 
tion these traditions, on a subject, as it seemed then to be, of 
infinitely secondary moment — the veriest "tithing of mint and 
anise and cummin ; " and the sea of Presbyterian faces, lec- 
turers, doctors, books, and temples, spreading to the horizon 
which my eye commanded, was hardly likely to disturb my 
confidence. 

While in England, Episcopacy appeared to retain its foot- 



PRINCETON. 



45 



ing by the argument of the sword and of a grinding aristoc- 
racy, in America it appeared to us to be breathing out a sickly 
existence, with scarcely a place of promise for its sepulchre, 
or any to " sing or say " its own burial service over it, when it 
should die. In some way or other, I got over the ground at 
Princeton, without knowing the causes that had held back the 
Episcopal Church from its destiny upon this continent, or the 
sorrowful fact, that from Massachusetts Bay to the Gulf of 
Florida, it was by friend and foe bound hand and foot, and 
systematically and perseveringly degraded to that miserable 
state, from which the wonder is, that it ever revived, or out- 
lived the crisis of national independence. Although I knew 
that the solemn legislation of Connecticut made it death for a 
priest to be seen, after the first warning, within the settlements, 
yet I was not aware of the untiring and successful resistance, 
in the other colonies, to the introduction of the Episcopate 
into this land, whenever the attempt was made, and even when 
a Queen's bounty at one time, and private munificence at 
others, had furnished ample securities for its support. Soon 
after the Restoration, Dr. Murray was actually appointed 
the Bishop for Virginia, but the measure was defeated by the 
joint agency of Erastian indifference and Puritanical remon- 
strance. Again, forty years after, in 1704, the clergy in this 
country unanimously urged the like step on the attention of 
the English government, and, to avoid the odium of taxation, 
offered a tenth of their own substance to meet the expense. 
Again, about eight years after, in the reign of Queen Anne, 
and without oppression to any of her subjects, a fund was 
actually provided, hy the sale of wild lands in the West Indies, 
for the maintenance of the Episcopate at four different points 
in the American colonies, where it would have been most cor- 
dially received; but the death of the Queen and a change of 
government gave fresh opportunity for the opponents of the 
Church to keep her under foot. Again, in 1713, the venerable 



46 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts — 
a society still prosecuting its ancient work with the wisdom 
and dignity of age, and the ardor and energy of youth — pur- 
chased at Burlington (the very spot now redeemed by the ex- 
ertions of a noble Prelate to the church) a house and glebe for 
a Bishop's residence. Within the twenty years following, not 
only the living, but the dying " wept when they remembered 
Zion " in America, and frequent donations and legacies from 
hands in England that would have reached that Zion if they 
could, and hearts that " it pitied to see her in the dust," from 
persons known and unknown, from male and female, from the 
humble layman to the highest dignitary of the church, con- 
tinued to swell the fund, and invite the extension of the Epis- 
copate to the American colonies. But government was deaf. 
And it was jealous. And it had its troubles at home. And 
the age was an age of indifference, such as experience has 
now taught us to look for, after a long prevalence of noise and 
cant, attended, as they usually are, and as they were with the 
English Puritans, by animosity and violence. In short, the 
Puritans and Presbyterians would not allow it ; and they then 
held the balance of power. 

A hundred and thirty years it was, after Dr. Murray 
was nominated Bishop for Virginia, that Samuel Seabury — 
a name impossible to speak, without associating it with the 
purest and brightest that have been " written in heaven " — 
was sent forth the first apostle to America. For nearly two 
centuries had the Church in this land travail and sorrow, be- 
fore her first Bishop was born. In vain did she pray to be 
delivered. The marvel is, that she did not, as it was intended, 
perish in the crisis. And now the children of those very Pu- 
ritans have the courage, or it may be in their case, as it was 
in mine, the ignorance to challenge tins recurrence to the 
past, by turning the late, or if } t ou please the present condi- 
tion of our Church to our reproach. " Among the least," says 



PRINCETON. 



47 



Mr. Barnes, " of the tribes of Israel." Be it so. " As for this 
sect, we know that everywhere it is spoken against." Not in 
the British Parliament alone, are Romanist and Protestant 
combined against her, and " Herod and Pilate made friends 
together." " Among the least of the tribes of Israel !" So 
was Bethlehem-Ephratah, "little among the thousands of Ju- 
dah," yet wise men, and even the shepherds of flocks, got to 
hear how the Lord had made it beautiful with his presence, 
and found their way to it, and knelt in humble adoration in 
its dust. " Among the least of the tribes of Israel," says a 
Presbyterian ; " Christianity was born in a manger," said a 
parishioner of mine, the son of a Presbyterian, " and ought to 
be kept there." Go a little further, I replied, and say, " she 
was once nailed to the cross, and ought to be kept there" 
Nearly two centuries was the Church down-trodden in this 
land ; none to administer her discipline ; her sacramental 
character obscured, and one-third of her pious sons, who 
were forced away to England for ordination, deterred from 
returning, or dying from the hardships of the voyage. Nor 
was the Church emancipated, or a Bishop allowed at her 
altars, until the drums of the revolution roused in her unwil- 
ling heart, at last, a sense of this injustice, and some of her 
very priests went girded to the field, and, with her own Wash- 
ington at the head of the continental army, and her own 
White as chaplain to the continental Congress, she became 
forever free. 

But, to return from this apology for the depressed condition 
of our Church, as the present generation has seen it in the 
United States : in England, as I have said, quite ignorant of 
the almost universal hold that the Church has there on the 
affections of the people, we were led to think that it retained 
its footing rather by the argument of the sword, and of an 
overawing aristocracy. Nor did it then occur to me, that it 
might be perhaps the conservative character of her religion, 



48 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



that had put into her hand that " glittering spear," and ha 
given such power to her aristocracy, imposing upon Europ 
the hated policy — Pacem cum Anglo, bellum cum reliqui 
Of the Greek and Oriental Churches I had scarcely hear 
Rome was not to be taken into the account, and the whol 
world of orthodoxy, piety and common sense, seemed, in m 
youthful and honest eyes, to be Protestant and Presbyterian 
The little island of Great Britain was accidentally Episcop 
and liturgical — the universe beside, both earth and heave 
was anti-liturgical and Presbyterian. " Why are you foreve 
preaching against Bishops ? " said a dissatisfied hearer to 
Presbyterian divine. " Because," was the prompt reply, " 
always find it in the text." " Well, I will give you a text 
where you will not find it ; Genesis, first chapter, first verse." 
Accordingly the next Sunday the preacher began — "The 
Book of Genesis, the first chapter, at the first verse — ' In the 
beginning God created the heaven and the earth/ — but not 
one word, my brethren, of his creating Bishops." 

To speak plainly and honestly, Episcopacy was, in our es- 
timation, a religion for masters and their slaves ; but Presby- 
tery for the free ; Episcopacy for such as would be startled 
at the question, " Canst thou speak Greek ? " and are there- 
fore without the means of knowing that " Bishop and Pres- 
byter are titles of the same import in the New Testament ;" 
and Presbytery for those who can establish the synonymes in 
Greek, and translate Jerome, Chrysostom, Augustine, and 
even Clemens and Ignatius, by the hair of the head, over to 
the side of Presbyterianism : Episcopacy for men who must 
have books to tell them what to pray for ; Presb} 7 tery for such 
as can get this information from their hearts : Episcopacy for 
" sentimental formalists and priestly drones," as a late writer 
in Connecticut has called them, who cannot be spurred by 
the warmth of an emotion, or by the abundance of the theme, 
to swell their sermons beyond twenty minutes ; and Presby- 



PRINCETON. 



49 



terianism for men, whose feelings can warm with their themes, 
and whose discourses bid defiance to the hour : Episcopacy 
for such as loiter in the cool shade, and beneath the ripe clus- 
ters of the vineyards ; but Presbytery for laborers, who " bear 
the heat and burden of the day :" Episcopacy for those who 
would cling to the stereotypes of the past; Presbytery for 
those who can adapt, and modify, and change, as often as the 
times and the tide require : Episcopacy for intolerably plain 
and prosy preachers, dwelling continually on the tame max- 
ims of morals and religion ; Presbytery for ministers who can 
rise, and carry their flocks up with them, above such trifling 
matters as the obligations of daily life, and can entertain their 
audience by showing that they have at their fingers' end the 
intellectual universe. We regarded Episcopalians, at the 
time I speak of, and that time with many is not by any means 
past, as far behind us in piety and scholarship, owing in some 
measure, as I suppose, to the fact that individualism is hap- 
pily lost in the Church, and that the Episcopal clergy are, for 
the most part, content with the fixed " yea, yea, and nay, 
nay " of the primitive creed, and are satisfied if they can im- 
bue their preaching, like their prayers, with the simple learn- 
ing and the simple piety of other days, gathering as they do 
from the short and melancholy history of Presbyterianism, 
that " whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Said 
an eminent divine, who was asked why he had exchanged the 
declamatory manner of his earlier ministry, for a style more 
dispassionate and mild, " When I was young, I thought it 
was the thunder that killed, but when I grew wiser, I disco- 
vered that it was the lightning ; so I determined that in fu- 
ture I would thunder less and lighten more." 

With these views, which might have been rectified by better 
acquaintance with the Episcopal Church, and particularly 
with her clergy, who for the most part deny themselves the 
luxury of exhibiting their learning or their piety, as incom- 

5 



50 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



patible in general with the intentions of their office, and theii 
own proper fitness for its duties, I entered the Presbyterian 
ministry. I had been personally acquainted, in my whole life, 
with but two or three of the Episcopal clergy ; and of these, 
the only one that I ever intimately knew, I had seen, in the 
day of " revivals " spying out, and to all appearance coveting 
the liberty of his dissenting brethren, and mingling, to great 
disadvantage, with all sorts of sects, who amused themselves 
much at his awkward balancings among them, and assigning 
as his best reason for not admitting these brethren into his 
pulpit, that " one of the canons of his church forbade it." By 
the way, it was an apology that elicited from an illiterate old 
lady, that had been for many years the housekeeper in my 
father's family, a remark having a range and force of mean- 
ing, of which she in her dotage, and myself then fourteen 
years of age, but little dreamed, that "if that were the case, 
she thought they had better fire that canon off." Right! 
Thought I to myself — and so I acknowledge that it strikes 
me still — that if Episcopacy be of the small importance that 
some attach to it, " they had better fire that canon off." 

Leaving Princeton with such impressions, it is not surprising 
that, with no temptation to call them in question ; with " Bishop 
and Presbyter for convertible terms in the New Testament ; " 
with " the testimony of the famous Jerome," called by Prosper 
in his own age the magister mundi, and by Erasmus long 
afterward "the prince of divines," ringing forever in my ear ; 
with a faint echo from Augustine, "the most brilliant and 
orthodox link of the catena between Paul and Calvin ; " I 
found neither time nor inclination, amidst the convulsive 
throes of revivalism, and the monstrous brood of theological 
shiboleths, to which those throes gave birth, to review opinions 
which had in their favor, as I had been taught, and as I still 
believed, the entire evidence of scripture, and " the unanimous 
consent of the first three centuries of the Church." 



CHAPTER V. 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 

I am aware that it is quite easy to discover inconveniences 
and evils in the working of particular theories or systems, 
however wisely conceived, so long as those systems must de- 
pend for their preservation or efficiency upon the sagacity and 
purity of human counsels. But where tEe evils are found to 
be co-extensive with the system ; and where the system is 
unshackled and free to work out its legitimate results, and yet 
makes no effort to throw these evils off ; but they circulate 
invariably with its life, and pursue it as closely as the shadow 
does its substance, and eat as a canker to its very core ; it is 
perfectly fair to suspect some radical defect, and to look into 
the system itself for an explanation of the fact. 

One of the worst and earliest inconveniences, that I found 
adhering to the system from which I have been emancipated, 
was its unwarrantable restriction of the sacrament of bap- 
tism. I had received, so far as those around me could im- 
part it, a power to baptize, and to " suffer little children to 
come " — and expressly, it had been, as I supposed, enjoined 
me by the master, to " forbid them not." But I presently 
discovered that my church forbade them. So well is this 
prohibition understood among Presbyterians, that a minister 
is seldom, and many a minister among them never, called on 
to baptize a child, unless at least one of its parents be a com- 



52 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



municant in the church. If it be said, that their written dis- 
cipline does not necessarily impose this restriction, and that 
formerly a better custom obtained, I have only to reply, that 
this is then another of the instances, to be often adverted to 
hereafter, in which the written and fixed traditions of the sys- 
tem have been supplanted by the unwritten or the variable 
and the popular. 

But before proceeding further, let us know what are the 
facts which we intend to employ as premises in this discus- 
sion. And let us first adduce those of a more general nature 
and from authentic documents, that, when we come to state 
those of our own private experience, they may not be sus- 
pected of exaggeration or distortion. 

In the month of May, 1848, there were in connection with 
the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church, 192,022 
communicants ; and the number of infants baptized, within 
the ecclesiastical year, was 9,837 ; or, one infant to between 
nineteen and twenty communicants. It would therefore re- 
quire nineteen and a half years to make the number of bap- 
tized children, if every one of them should live, equal to the 
present number of communicants. 

Now take the Presbyteries of the great cities from Canada 
to Florida, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. 



Presbyteries. 



Communicants. 



Infants baptized. 



Proportion ot 
inft's baptized 
to no. of com. 



Albany, 4,173 

New York, 4,729 
New Brunswick, 4,534 

Baltimore, 2,395 

Cincinnati, 1,672 

St. Louis, 1,159 

Charleston, 843 



125 
226 
165 
109 
62 
57 
35 



1 to 33 
1 to 21 
1 to 27 
1 to 22 
1 to 27 
1 to 20 
1 to 24 



19,505 



779 



1 to 25 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 



53 



Now, in contrast with this, as far as I have access to annual 
Reports and Journals, the proportion of infants baptized to 
the number of communicants, in the Episcopal church, is a 
little more than one to five.* During a ministry of six years 
in the Church, I have with my own hand baptized as many 
children as the whole Presbytery of New York with its thirty- 
five ministers, according to the above table, would do in three. 

But, to go still more into detail. The mother of Presbyterian 
churches in New York numbers 373 communicants ; the Rev. 
Dr. Phillips reports fifteen infants baptized the past year. The 
Brick church has 668 communicants ; Dr. Spring reports 
twenty-six infants baptized. The Rev. Dr. Potts, who has 
wtitten against Episcopacy as " illiberal and anti-republican/' 
has 282 communicants, and reports twelve infants baptized. 
The Rev. Dr. Smith, of Charleston, who was my classmate 
at Princeton, and has written a book in defence of Presbytery, 
has 408 communicants, and reports six infants baptized. The 
Rev. Dr. Boardman, of Philadelphia, also my cotemporary at 
Princeton, reports 482 communicants, and one infant baptized. 
He too, I believe, has written a book against the Episcopal 
church. Thus, while the books multiply, the flocks diminish. 

Early in my ministry, a circumstance occurred, that forced 
this subject very afFectingly upon my notice. I had in those 
days, a sister, in whose heart had long dwelt a measure of 
the grace of God, that is, if some of the most pleasing fruits 
of piety may make it lawful so to pronounce ; although the 
spark often trembled for existence, unreplenished as it was 
from the fires of the altar. She was one of those many per- 
sons, who, under the influences of insufficient teaching, look 

* In some few Calvanistic congregations, the proportion sinks to one half 
this estimate. Thus, in St. George's, New York, according to the last 
Report, the number of communicants was 463, and of infants baptized, 45; 
or one to ten. But the same year, the number of communicants in the 
Diocese was 13,486, and of infants baptized 2,658, or one to five. 



54 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



unfortunately on the sacrament of the altar, not with too much 
awe — that were impossible — tout with that kind of dread, 
which man's chief enemy employs to keep back the hungering 
and fainting heart from the strengthening nourishment of " the 
children's bread." And my sister's soul was of that sensitive 
and gentle texture, that it stood amazed, and at times half 
wild, at the exactions of a stern and frigid Galvanism ; and the 
bruised reed had been often well nigh broken, and the smoking 
flax well nigh been quenched. 

Having myself embraced with much satisfaction that view 
of the sacraments, which is yet to be found in the Confession 
of Faith, where it stands as a witness against an unbelieving 
age, I fell into conversation with my sister, respecting the 
education of the lovely children which the Lord had given 
her, and pressed her with the fact, that the only " good begin- 
ning" she could make with them, must date from the grace 
of baptism. She told me, that it had been the most painful 
desire of her heart, to have them baptized ; but knowing as 
she was not a communicant herself, that the customs of her 
church did not allow it, she had never dared to ask it. She 
then inquired of me, if I would baptize them for her. " Can 
any man forbid water," said I to myself, " that these should 
be baptized as well as we," we, who are far more filled than 
they, with all manner of unbelief and sin ? What am I, that 
I should usurp the throne of judgment, and " visit the sins of 
the fathers upon the children ? " What right have I, even 
were the parents visibly withering in the blight of a secret 
and eternal decree, to include in it those little ones, that, like 
the "six score thousand" in Nineveh, that turned God's 
judgment into mercy, " cannot discern their right hand from 
their left?" The practice of my church forbids them; but 
my heart, and One greater than my heart says, " Forbid them 
not." I could not hesitate. I felt it proper however to advise 
her, first to make trial of her own pastor, who was weary 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 55 



himself, as I knew, of some of the asperities of his theology; 
and who accordingly gave the sweet infants, privately, for 
fear of establishing an injurious precedent, the sacrament, 
which his church in the like circumstances, universally with- 
holds. It must be added however, that this excellent man 
thought it necessary afterward to apologize for this act of 
mercy, on the ground that, in the right and might of his own 
" private judgment," he had himself for a long time regarded 
their mother as a believing Christian. Only in two other in- 
stances, during a ministry of seven years, can I recollect 
having been requested to baptize the children of a non-com- 
municant. It is a pleasing reminiscence now, that, in all 
these instances, the practice of a purer age invited me to rise 
above the tramels of a new-invented theory, and to refuse to 
do it homage where it did violence to every feeling of the 
heart. And sad and chill would be my visits now to the 
silent field, where the three flowers, snatched from a sister's 
bosom, lie each in its bed, waiting to rise and bloom side by 
side again, when the Sun of righteousness shall return and 
shine upon the sod, were I to recollect, that, before they were 
planted in that dust, I had raised a finger to prevent their being 
watered, by any human hand, with the dews of baptism. But 
little did I suspect that that mother would have so soon been 
called to bathe with her tears the brows that had been so 
lately bathed at the fountain of grace. Not many have drunk, 
at a single draught, so deeply of the Master's cup as she. 

" The shaft flew thrice, and thrice her peace was slain, 
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn." 

" For God, to draw her spirit heavenward, 

Severed the golden chains that bound her here, 
And placed her idols nearer to himself, 
To lure her onward to the better land.''* 

For, as they have been planted in the likeness of His death, 



56 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



they shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection. And it 

is sweet to think, 

" Babes, thither caught from womb and breast. 
Have right to sing above the rest, 
For they have gained the happy shore 
They never saw nor sought before. 

" We are the babes no more 
That gave their feeble wailing to thine ear, 
Free from the cumbering clay, we mount, we soar, 
Onward and upward through a boundless sphere. 

We dwell no more with pain — 
We shed no tears — we feel no panting breath — 
Sweet mother, do not grieve for us again, 
We are so blest, we bless the hand of death. 

Turn with unwavering trust 
From the green earth-bed where the body lies, 
Thou didst but lay our covering in the dust, 
Thy children live, will live beyond the skies. 

There we shall meet again, 
yes ! believe it, meet to part no more ! 
We'll welcome thee with heaven's angelic train, 
And lead thee to the Saviour we adore." 

But again to the cold regions of speculation, and to my 
chilling theme. To me the reasoning was direct and just, 
that the child, that is unfit to be baptized, is unfit to die ; the 
child that may not be admitted into the church below, for fear 
of tainting it, may not be admitted into the pure bosom of the 
church above. There is no evading the startling inference, 
and humanity shudders and falls back from the terrible 
conclusion ! Tell me not, when my child is dead, that it has 
gone safe ; why then did you withhold the token of its safety, 
that antitupoji of St. Peter, of which he declares that the ark 
upon the water, and the water bearing up the ark, and both 
conspiring to save the eight members of the church of God, 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 



57 



were together the type ? " The like figure whereunto," he 
declares, " even Baptism, doth also now save us." Tell us 
not, when our children are dead, that although the Bible is not 
a revelation to infants, yet the intimations that it drops give 
us reason to believe that they have gone safe ! for these 
insinuations pierce the heart with a sting more acute than 
death, and your withholding Baptism leaves with us the awful 
feeling — mistify and disguise it as you may — that you are not 
quite certain that our dear departed ones were born again. 

The Presbyterian church, not content with making so pro- 
minent the disheartening view of election, which it has chosen 
to incorporate into her faith, has undertaken to intimate, 
at least in a general way, which of our very babes are not of 
" that happy number," by allowing Baptism — the " sign and 
seal," as they believe of that election — to one infant, and by 
refusing it to another. Yet the laity, for the most part, sub- 
mit tamely to the usurpation — a usurpation unmatched, so far 
as I know, both in its essence and its extent, by any tyranny 
of priest-ridden Rome. Yet I have known instances, in 
which the parent, urged on by the cry of nature, and the voice 
of God within him, has taken his child "by night" to the 
minister of a Church, that claims to be " the Lamb's wife" 
and the "mother of us all" — a Church that, since the beginning 
of the creation, has never withheld her Baptism from the lost 
children of Adam. Yes, we proclaim it with unmingled satis- 
faction, that this same Church so denounced as exclusive, 
bigoted, intolerant — pours from her open hand the waters of 
pardon and of promise on the universal family. How is it 
that Presbyterianism — with a confession that speaks of " elect 
men" and of " elect angels" and of " ELECT INFANTS " 
(see Conf. chapters iii and x.) — and notoriously and every 
hour withholding baptism from new-born babes, for no other 
reason than the lurking apprehension that these babes may 
not be " of the happy number " — has claimed so long to be 



58 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



considered " liberal " and democratic ; while the church that 
clasps your infant to her heart as soon as it is born, and 
beckons the whole family of man within her pale, has been 
branded as illiberal, intolerant, and bigoted ? 

The day for this ad captandum declaration is passing away, 
and the eyes of the people are opening to the facts. " Suffer 
the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not/' say 
the Lamb and the Lamb's bride : — " Suffer the children of 
communicants whom we have privately examined, and pro- 
nounced to have in our judgment the marks of distinguishing 
grace to come," says the Presbyterian religion. " He died 
for all," " a ransom for all," " that He by the grace of God 
should taste death for every man," declares the Holy Ghost, 
and redeclares it by the church that he inspires : — " Neither 
are any other redeemed by Christ, but the elect only," contends 
the Presbyterian confession, (chap. hi. sec. 7.) " The grace 
of God, that bringeth salvation, hath appeared unto all men," 
proclaim the Bible and the echoing Church : — "AH those whom 
God hath predestinated unto life, and those only, he is pleased 
in his appointed and accepted time, effectually to call, by his 
word and spirit," reasserts the Presbyterian confession. " Who 
will have all men to be saved," is the teaching of the Gospel 
and the Church : — " By the decree of God, for the manifesta- 
tion of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto 
everlasting life, and others are foreordained to everlasting 
death," and, " These men and angels, thus predestinated and 
foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed, and 
their number is so certain and definite, that it cannot be either 
increased or diminished," is the sad wail of the Presbyterian 
confession, (chap, iii, sec. 3-4.) 

We appeal to the understandings of men. Which of the 
two is illiberal and bigoted? Let the Presbyterian, whose 
child, for which Christ died, and which Christ pronounced 
more fit for the kingdom of God than we, and to be the ob- 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM- 



59 



ject of an angel's watch and guard, has yet been excluded 
from the church on earth and from the only Sacrament which 
an infant can receive, answer this question. A day will come, 
when the Presbyterian ministry will be compelled to a better 
practice, or their people into a better Church. That day may 
be delayed by prudently keeping the subject in the back 
ground, and the people in ignorance of the efficacy and the 
grace of Baptism. Their ministers dare not bring it forward, 
and hold it up, as it is exhibited in their own Confession of 
Faith. Listen to its solemn and delightful testimony ! " Bap- 
tism is a sacrament of the New Testament, not only for the 
solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible church, 
but also to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of 
grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of REGENERATION, 
of remission of sins." — " The efficacy of Baptism is not tied 
to that moment of time wherein it is administered ; yet not- 
withstanding, by the right use of this ordinance, the grace 
promised is not only offered, but really exhibited and conferred 
by the Holy Ghost, to such, whether of age or INFANTS, as 
that grace belongeth unto, according to the counsel of God's 
own will, in his appointed time." (Conf. chap, xxviii, sees. 1 
and 6.) " Let but the commons hear this testament ! " With 
the recovery of the lost doctrine of " efficacy," and " grace " 
and " regeneration," and " ingrafting into Christ " and " re- 
mission of sins " " not only offered, but really exhibited and 
conferred by the Holy Ghost," in Baptism, their ministers 
would be compelled to make its living waters again free for 
all, or parents, driven by the instincts of their natures, would 
fly, with their children in their arms, like doves into the 
church windows. Ministers of the Presbyterian church ! I 
call upon you by the deep solemnity of an awful sacrament — 
and many a pained heart among your people joins me in the 
call — to justify this language that you hold respecting " elect 
infants," or to abandon the practice that results from it in 



60 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH* 



drawing a dividing line among infants, and excluding the ma- 
jority from the grace of Baptism. The rains of heaven fall 
alike on all. The sun in heaven shines equally on all. The 
wind from heaven is wafted alike to all. The rivers and the 
fountains spring and flow for all. Free for all, is the plain 
handwriting upon every work of God. What then is this 
distinction you have drawn between my neighbor's children 
and my own ? Speak ! Tell us plainly, are some of them 
elect, and others not ? or are some of them born but once, 
and others born again ? I venture to term it an oppression 
that the Church in no age and in no instance ever dared to 
impose — nay, a cruelty, that Rome, in the days of her worst 
tyranny, would have shuddered to inflict; this punishing the 
parent in the child, repelling a redeemed infant, because its 
parents have sinned, from the only Sacrament of which it is 
capable, the heaven- ordained point at which grace is sent 
forth to meet it. It " asks bread," and, because its parents 
have not eaten the bread that you break, with a heart as 
cold and hard as your gift, you " give it a stone :" " it asks 
an egg," and, to sting the erring parent, you put into its little 
hand " a scorpion :" it " asks a fish," and you " give it a ser- 
pent," and leave it to become the serpent's prey. 

It is a discipline that is fast driving off reflecting Presby- 
terians among the Baptists, or back by God's blessing to the 
Episcopal Church. So few already are the infants baptized 
in the Presbyterian denomination in this country, that it differs 
but little from a Baptist community, and may in strict propri- 
ety of phrase be called a semi-Baptist church. The differ- 
ence between them is, that the one excludes all infants indis- 
criminately from Baptism ; the other, venturing to discrimi- 
nate, excludes more than three-fourths. As might have been 
expected, the Baptists in their position are altogether the 
stronger of the two. Every Presbyterian minister well knows 
that even his communicants often acquiesce in infant Baptism 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 61 



on vague and insufficient grounds, or are constantly harassed 
by most painful and perplexing doubts. Let me be rather 
the consistent Baptist, in a good conscience, denying Baptism 
to all infants alike, than the semi-Baptist, daring to tread 
where Gabriel would quake to follow, and to draw among the 
infants of a span long the tremendous separation between 
sheep and goats. As a layman I might have tamely sub- 
mitted to the iron rule, and without resistance have heard the 
clinking key opening the kingdom to one infant and locking 
it against another ; but, as a theologian, I could not endure 
the thought, or long believe, that this was the representative 
or the lawful almoner of God's love upon earth. 1 became 
early and clearly satisfied, that, on this most interesting point 
at least, Episcopacy was in the right, gathering, as the right- 
ful mother, the universe of infants to her arms; and that 
Presbytery was in the wrong, to a degree that the world can 
hardly ever forgive or any longer endure. 

That sectarianism has ever borne a singular resemblance to 
Romanism, has been remarked ever since its birth, and is not 
surprising, if we reflect, that they are of a common parentage, 
born at the same time, one at Westminster, and one at Trent, 
and that the twins alike decline to have their legitimacy tested,, 
by bringing into court the ancient mother — the Catholic or 
universal faith. My musings on the abuse and disuse of Bap- 
tism brought the coincidence of the two systems strikingly to 
mind. If the Romanist has erred and played the tyrant in 
subtracting from " the people " the more significant part of 
the Christian sacrifice ; the part, of which the Lord emphati- 
cally, as if to forestal the usurpation, said, " Drink ye all of 
it ; " the Presbyterian has erred and played the tyrant, in sub- 
tracting the whole of another most precious sacrament from 
millions of little ones, all pure in heart, of which the Saviour 
of the world, with the like emphasis, as if to anticipate this 
usurpation also, said, and said in a moment when he " was 



62 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



much displeased," " Suffer the little children to come unto me, 
and forbid them not ; for of such is the kingdom of heaven." 
If then I am bid to fly from Romanism, for withholding the 
more significant portion of one sacrament, from those who 
are entitled to receive it ; with all the holy instincts of pa- 
rental love, let me fly from Presbyterianism, for withholding 
another sacrament — the only one of which my child is capa- 
ble — from infants, who, by a Redeemer's legacy, are entitled 
to its benefits, and who, after the Testator's resurrection, were 
still upon his heart, when he said to a shepherd of his flock, 
" Feed my lambs," If ye love me, " feed my lambs." 

I know the Pelagianism that thrives wherever Presbytery 
has prepared the soil, and the secret thought with many, and 
the practical feeling with more, that infants do not need the 
grace of Baptism, nor indeed any grace whatever. I was 
once invited in this land of ours into a pious family in New- 
York, for the purpose of baptizing a dying infant, whose Bap- 
tism had been already very carelessly delayed. Even at that 
time I had so far a glimmering perception of the truth, as to 
understand that Baptism was at least a joyful expression of 
the parents' faith in the new salvation ; that it was the visible 
bond of the Christian brotherhood on earth ; that it conveyed 
the grace which to one " conceived in sin and shapen in 
iniquity " is indispensable ; and that infant Baptism, to take 
the lowest view of it, was a compliance with the will of 
Christ, and was the dictate of natural humanity and of pa- 
rental instinct. Such were my musings as I went on my un- 
accustomed errand to baptize a dying child. Aware that 
Pelagianism had deeply tainted the minds of both the parents, 
I rather wondered that this should have been the only instance 
of the kind in which I had ever been invited to officiate. But 
on my arrival at the house, where the healing waters were 
already sparkling in the bowl, and the sweet infant about to 
return to the arms that encircled infants when He was on 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 63 



earth, the mother of the child, seeming to understand that the 
Baptism of an infant must after all mean something, interposed 
a murmur, that "it needed no Baptism — and was as safe with- 
out it— why should it be disturbed % " Her infant died — died 
unbaptized — went into eternity without faith's mark upon its 
brow — and was saved, as the child of the infidel or Hottentot 
is saved, with nought to impart to it a difference of glory in 
the resurrection, nought by which angels might know that it 
had come from a christian land, in fact without the only sa- 
crament by which the gospel can be preached, or its distinc- 
tive grace conveyed to an infant mind. I have not to this 
hour recovered the shock that this occurrence gave me ; nor 
could I now tell whether the stronger emotion was disgust or 
grief. Even then I sympathized not only with Baxter, and 
Owen, and Edwards, and Miller in their view of the privileges 
to which Baptism exalted the recipient, not only with Presi- 
dents Finlay and Smith, who, in the belief that original sin is 
washed away in this sacrament and the recipient placed on a 
new footing and under happier auspices, were in the habit of 
baptizing as many infants as they could reach ; but my sym- 
pathies were entirely with the Confession of Faith, which, in 
common with all others of the period of the Reformation, ex- 
alts this sacrament to be the vehicle of quickening and regen- 
erating grace. Such views, although I have never seen a 
Presbyterian layman that either embraced or understood them, 
have not, it is fair to say, entirely disappeared among the 
Presbyterian clergy. The present Professor of Theology at 
Princeton — perhaps as profound a divine as Galvanism in 
either hemisphere can boast of, and whose qualities of heart 
are not inferior to those of his mind, on the subject of Baptism, 
for a moment partially eluded the trammels of his system, as 
that system has been recently developed, and, consistently 
enough with the written confession of his church, has dropped 
the following language : " And when about to dedicate their 



64 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



children to God, in Holy Baptism, how earnestly should they 
[the parents] pray, that they might be baptized with the Holy 
Ghost — that while their bodies are washed in the emblematical 
laver of regeneration, their souls may experience the renew- 
ing of the Holy Ghost, and the sprinkling of the blood of 
Jesus. If the sentiments, expressed above, be correct, then 
may there be such a thing as baptismal regeneration " [the 

italics are his own ;] " and, what time in infancy is 

more likely to be the period of spiritual quickening, than the 
moment when that sacred rite is performed, which is strikingly 
emblematical of this change If by means, be under- 

stood something which is accompanied by the divine efficien- 
cy, changing the moral nature of the infant, then in this sense, 
baptism may be called the means of regeneration!' * 

But the view of this Sacrament, that stares them in the face, 
on the pages of their written standards, Presbyterians have 
for the most part lost; and we fear that there is no conserva- 
tive or counteracting principle in the system, to which we can 
look with any hope for its recovery. We rather fear, that, 
having gotten so far away from their standards, the gravitation 
toward them is continually lessening, and the whole body is 
fated to go farther still into still chillier regions. Some few 
perhaps may fall in love with the opinions put forth in a 
volume some years ago by a living eminent divine of New 
York, that infants have a law written on their hearts, against 
which they are capable of wilful sin, and may be the proper 
subjects of everlasting perdition before they have even seen the 
light of day ; — from which the inference will be direct, that 
they must not therefore be baptized, until they have given ac- 
tual signs of repentance. Others will adopt the more popular 
Pelagianism, that infants, being not yet sinners, do not yet stand 

* Thoughts on Religious Experience by the Rev. Archibald Alexander, D. D., 
Professor, &c. ; published by the Presbyterian Board of Publication, 400 pages, see 
page 26 of the Third Edition. 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 65 



in need of Baptism ; — from which, though an opposite quarter 
to the former, the same result must follow, that infants by and 
bj will receive no Baptism. A more consistent and ingenious 
portion will adhere to the old Calvanistic ground of their 
Confession, that there are " elect infants," as well as " elect 
angels and men," — which, from the difficulty of ascertaining 
them, will greatly abridge, as it has fearfully abridged already, 
the extent of infant Baptism, and must cause it ultimately to 
fall into disuse. With others, again, the Quaker or mystic 
notion of a spiritual church, into which Presbyterians are fast 
degenerating, will continue rapidly to gain ground, and will 
greatly discourage, and eventually wipe out the last vestiges 
of infant Baptism. It is demonstrable from facts and figures, 
that, if infant Baptism grow as rapidly into disuse among 
Presbyterians for the time to come as it has done for fifty 
years past, one hundred years hence, the Presbyterian church 
as a pcedobaptist society will exist no more. It is already as 
we have called it, a semi-Baptist denomination. In the Pres- 
bytery of St. Louis, the number of adults baptized the last 
year wanted but eight, to be equal to that of baptized infants ; 
that of Cincinnati wanted but twenty-two ; that of New 
Brunswick, including Princeton, wanted but twelve ; the adults 
being one hundred and fifty three, the infants one hundred and 
sixty five. 

The Baptists see distinctly that infant Baptism cannot be 
maintained, and is not worth maintaining, on the popular 
grounds adduced by Presbyterians in its defence. In fact 
they see that, separated from regeneration, it ceased to be a 
Sacrament ; and not knowing " a more excellent way," and 
laying themselves the stress which Holy Scripture lays upon 
the ordinance, they will stand firm, and must necessarily in- 
crease by continual accessions from the Presbyterians, who 
will find it more and more out of their power to resist the en- 
croachment. Meanwhile the Church, planting one foot on the 

6* 



66 LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



ground of the Baptists, as to the value and efficacy of the 
Sacrament, and the other on the ground of the Bible and of 
humanity, and of historical Christianity, as to its extent, will 
continue to flourish, with a stability and growth that shall 
provoke the losers in this game to jealousy. . Already, among 
the Presbyterians, infant Baptism has fallen into the disuse 
that Anabaptists could desire. Already thousands of parents, 
who still, from a vague compliance with old customs or with 
the wishes of a jealous pastor, " suffer " their little ones to 
come to the sacrament, are free to admit, that they scarcely 
see a necessity for what they do. Already, the pious Presby- 
terian is not made a whit more unhappy for having failed to 
imprint the token of its safety on the pale forehead of a de- 
ceased or dying child, than the pious Pelagian ! 

Indeed, Presbyterians are now but little behind the Quakers 
in reform. The " spiritual " — the " spiritual " — the " spiritual " 
— this is the sense in which every thing is to be understood ; 
and if you speak to them of order and ordination, the daily 
prayer, the weekly oblation, outward reverence and external 
rites, bodily fasting and alms-deeds and worship, external 
Sacraments, and a visible Church binding the past to the pre- 
sent, and the present to the future, you seem but a Papist to 
many, and the lament of " a mixed multitude " rings sorrow- 
fully in your ear, " Take these things hence ! Are ye so car- 
nal ? Having begun in the spirit, are ye now made perfect by 
the flesh ? " In the determination to be " spiritual," they are 
hardly a whit behind Swedenborg himself in his flight from 
the regions of flesh and sense. To them, as to him, it would 
seem that the Jewish Church was but the creeping worm out 
of whose shell the Church Christian was to take wing, and the 
Church Christian, as it has heretofore existed, but the shell in 
its turn, which the " spiritual " brotherhood are to despise and 
leave behind. This crying down external order and sacra- 
mental privilege, and this assuming superior " spiritual " dis- 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 67 



cernment, as if they were " out of the body," or as if Christ 
had never come in the flesh may lull for a while the sense of 
injury on the subject which we are here discussing. But let 
Baptism get to be restored, among them to the place assigned 
to it by the Westminster divines in the Confession which their 
ministers still vow at their ordination to defend, and not more 
certainly will the ice relax under the returning sun of summer, 
than the people will demand, according to the charter of their 
rights and of unlimited redemption, that the sign of that re- 
demption be set on the foreheads of their children ; and that, 
when infants die, no cold perhaps shall follow them to the 
bosom of God ; no chilly reasoning shall come to bind up 
the parent's heart; no such language as " elect infants" shall 
be tolerated another hour ; but that every heartless distinction 
and doubt shall be wiped out, and the brotherhood of the hu- 
man family be restored, as the second Adam intended it to be, 
in the " One Baptism." If still they should be denied the 
heavenly boon— if still they should be driven from the healing 
waters, then their alternative will be, as with many it has al- 
ready been, to fly from the chill atmosphere of an exclusive 
and repulsive system — a system so stern that it can frown 
upon an infant in its cradle — to the more genial bosom of the 
church. 

Do not tell us that Presbyterians, in some other countries, 
still baptize children indiscriminately. 

We have something to say hereafter of the system as it ex- 
ists in other countries. In other countries it is hampered by 
the State, and " cannot do the things that it would." We are 
dealing now with Presbyterianism " under its own vine and 
fig-tree," where it is free, and freely working out its legitimate 
results. We raise our voice for the rights of parents among 
a preacher-ridden people — rights which a strange oppression 
springing up in this republic is trampling under foot. We lift 
our voice for the rights of infants to the blessings of " the 



68 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



kingdom of heaven " — infants, that like the " six score thou- 
sand " speechless but successful pleaders for the " salvation of 
Nineveh," have not known " their right hand from their left." 
We demand, in presence of a people who, like the Jews, sup- 
pose that they have never been in " bondage to any man," that 
there shall in the eye of the gospel be, at least among infants, 
no privilege or elect class. We demand the broad confession, 
that all our children have been redeemed by the blood gushing 
warm from a Saviour's heart, and that the water flowing with 
it from his side was intended to bathe their brow. In the ears 
of earth and heaven, we invoke the ancient charter of the 
Church against this encroachment on the inalienable rights 
and liberties of man. 

If I could give no other reason for my return to the Church, 
than has been here presented, I might, with a heart full of 
peace, here rest my appeal with God and men — that God, who 
with a Parent's heart has said, " Suffer little children to come 
unto me, and forbid them not " — and that humanity, which He 
has endowed with the same sympathies and the same parental 
instinct. 

But my dissatisfaction did not stop here, for the reason that 
the frightful evil does not stop here. Presbytery, like Popery, 
has, in its way, multiplied the sacraments, by, inevitably, sug- 
gesting the idea of two Baptisms. Or, as the Romanist has 
divided a commandment, to make up the ten ; so the Presby- 
terian has divided the sacrament of Baptism, to answer private 
views. I can recollect a time, when I imagined that the chief 
practical virtue of Baptism consisted in imposing vows and 
obligations on the parent, and thatits efficacy depended en- 
tirely on the faith of the parent in making the dedication of 
his child. Poor child ! regenerate or not, according to the 
parent's mind ! Wherein does this differ from Popery, which 
quickens the water or the wafer to its purpose, according to 
the intention of the priest ? 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 69 



Yet this is perhaps the prevailing explanation of this delight- 
ful sacrament among my former brethren. But if this be so, 
why — as I learned afterward to reason — why are not the 
words of the ceremony addressed to the parents ? And 
why is Baptism considered complete, even if the parent be 
not present? And why, though the parent should immedi- 
ately die, is the impressive ceremony never to be repeated, so 
that there should be never but the one Baptism ? And why 
are the words of Baptism addressed to the infant ? For in- 
stead of something impressive to the parent, the minister 
speaks in an unknown tongue — for it might as well be in 
Greek as in English — to a passive infant, saying, "N., I 
baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and 
of the Holy Ghost ? " Very extraordinary all this, thought I 
— that infants may not only be baptized in the same water 
with adults, but may be addressed in the same mysterious 
words, " I baptize thee " — if Baptism mean one thing — regen- 
eration — in the adult — and something else no mortal can tell 
what — in the infant ! 

Let Presbyterians answer the charge which we here make, 
that they hold two Baptisms ; a Baptism declaring to men and 
angels, as a fact, the regeneration of the adult ; and a Bap- 
tism declaring something else, certainly not regeneration, in 
an infant. If, when administered to an adult, it signifies that 
he is born again and restored to the favor of God, and, when 
ministered to an infant, it signifies that he is not born again ; 
we certainly perceive two Baptisms. Nor is there a possi- 
ble escape from this dilemma, except on ancient and Bible 
premises, that neither adult nor infant is " born again," but 
as it is accomplished by the joint agency of "the Spirit and 
the Bride," or, as our Lord expresses it, " except ye be born 
of water and of the Spirit." Tell us not, that Baptism admin- 
istered by you to infants, signifies prospective regeneration. 
This is Pelagianism. Tell us not, that it signifies their need 



70 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



of that regeneration ; for why then do you not baptize them 
all, or even, like the Jesuit, catch the wild Indian, and bon gre 
mat gre baptize him, as the most solemn method of declaring 
that he " must be born again ? " But you tell us, Baptism 
represents regeneration as accomplished, un fait accompli, in 
the adult ; then tell us, we ask again, what it does signify in 
the infant ? We repeat that we think you cannot tell. You 
know that your views are vague. 

No, sirs ; you must give up the ground you occupy to the 
Baptists, or you must go back to your Confession of Faith — ■ 
the offspring of a more vigorous and healthy Reformation. 
You must go back to the principles with which you set out 
three centuries ago, " one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism f for 
" by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body." What 
Baptism means in one, it means in all. What it signifies in 
the sinner of a hundred years, it signifies in the infant of a 
span long. " I baptize THEE in the name of the Father, 
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." You tell us what 
this is in an adult ; pray tell us, if you have the courage or 
the power, what it is in an infant. Only beware, that, in at- 
tempting it, you do not fall into a grand error of the Papists, 
and multiply sacraments, as they have done, or divide them, 
as they have divided a commandment, and as they have divi- 
ded the communion, and that you do not give a whole sacra- 
ment to adults, and a half sacrament to infants. For, besides 
dividing the communion, and withholding the cup from the 
laity, we hear that Romanists, in certain cases of discipline 
and penance, to prevent scandal and to save appearances, 
will allow a prince, or any other individual where the motive 
is sufficient, to approach the altar, and receive a wafer, but a 
wafer not consecrated, and therefore without virtue ; which 
has been called a blank or white communion. Precisely so, 
the Presbyterian ministry, it would now appear, give the same 
water and words, and, as the world looking on would think, 



ABUSES AND DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 



71 



the same thing, to the infant as to the adult ; but to the 
cheated infant, it is not the baptism that an adult receives — - 
it is a blank, white baptism. And while the Papist and the 
Presbyterian must look about them for a vindication of these 
strange abuses, I may in the meantime be allowed to think, 
that I have something to be gratified for, in being extricated 
from the toils of an oppressive system, and led out of the sic 
volo, sic jubeo, of Popery and Presbytery, into " the glorious 
liberty " of a Church — Catholic — Reformed — and Free. 



CHAPTER VI. 



SACRAMENTS. 



I have never remarked whether Presbyterian church edi- 
fices have eastern ends. Popish as it is, I suppose they some- 
times have. But I have heard that in an old Presbyterian 
burying ground on Long Island, the feet of the dead of a cer- 
tain epoch lie all toward the West, and that many years ago, 
an Episcopal clergyman, who desired to repose within its 
precincts, required by his will, that he should be interred, ac- 
cording to the ancient custom of all Christian folk, with his 
feet and face toward the East ; and that so it was allowed, 
and that the burial-place is still shown, whereby, " he being 
dead, yet speaketh." But, in a Presbyterian church, that 
stood a few years since in Wall-street, there was a Northern 
window — I believe, behind the pulpit — of some ecclesiologi- 
cal merit — perhaps of stained glass. An Episcopal clergy- 
man, wishing at that time to see the specimen, applied to a 
gentleman of that congregation, who very obligingly offered 
to accompany him into the church. As they stood together 
in the aisle, this gentleman, feeling doubtless safe in his own 
castle, took the opportunity to say to the clergyman, " Those 
Oxford men are doing an immensity of mischief y only to 
think, sir, of their altering the Bible ? " " What ! " said my 
friend, with some astonishment, " I was not aware that they 
had gone so far as that." " Yes, sir ; if you will step with 



SACRAMENTS. 



73 



me into the pulpit, I will show you. Here, sir, is an Oxford 
edition of the Bible, that we have lately got out from England ; 
and a young minister, officiating for our Pastor on Sabbath 
last, was reading the Revelation of John, and read it over 
and over — e the four living creatures — the four living crea- 
tures,' instead of ' the four beasts — I believe those Oxford 
men rather disrelish John's Revelation, particularly what he 
says about beasts ; — yes, sir, they are altering the Bible ? " 
" I hardly think that can be so," said the Episcopalian ; " let 
us look ! " The layman, as much as to say, "Now I have 
you," dashed into the Apocalypse, looking through grave 
glasses that had never deceived him before, for his " living 
creatures ; " when, lo, and behold, " the four beasts " — " the 
four beasts " — there they were, " the four beasts, lion, calf, 
man, and eagle," staring him in the face, " with eyes before 
and behind." " There's something wrong," said the layman, 
after a pause, " he certainly did read it so." " Very likely 
he did," replied the clergyman of the weather-beaten Church ; 
" There was nothing Roman however about it ; it was your 
young man wanting to show off his Greek ; I think I have 
heard that your Presbyterian ministers of late, in reading the 
Bible, often stop to correct the translation, and thus weaken 
the confidence of the people in its truthfulness ; but ours never 
do ; I do not think, Mr. N., you need be uneasy about the 
Oxford Divines ; at least about their altering the Bible." 

I have related this anecdote, because it is one of a class, 
and in my own mind is connected with another, which lies 
more directly in the plane of our narrative. A friend of mine 
— once, like myself, a Presbyterian minister, and now a cler- 
gyman of the Church— who had got a little weary of the pious 
lamentations of a Presbyterian neighbor, in the city of New 
York, over the fearful stridings of the Episcopal Church to- 
wards Rome, was at the house of his friend on a certain oc- 
casion, when, not much to his surprise, the old subject was 

7 



74 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



brought forward. " Poh ! " said the grave Elder of an up-town 
congregation, " your Church is going over to Popery as fast as 
it can ! " "A very grave charge," said his reverend guest, " I 
confess that I do not see how you would support it ; but, if 
you have any good reason for thinking so, no man would 
thank you more than myself, and no Church would be more 
thankful than the old acknowledged ' bulwark of the Refor- 
mation,' if you would let us know it." "Why," said the 
Elder, with a look over his spectacles more searching than his 
ratiocination, " you are teaching regeneration in Baptism, and 
something wondrous-like tralisubstantiation in the Lord's Sup- 
per ; — just see that ' Churchman ' published in this city ! Is 
not that Popery ? " " Let me understand you, my dear sir," 
said my friend, " for now-a-days we scarcely know what Po- 
pery is ; — would you call this Popery ? " {Reads from the last 
number of the Churchman) — " Baptism is a sacrament of the 
New Testament, not only for the solemn admission of the party 
baptized into the visible Church, but also to be unto him a sign 
and a seal of the covenant of grace of his ingrafting into 
Christ, of REGENERATION, of remission of sins." 
" Yes, that's it ! that's it ! Don't you call that Popery V inter- 
rupted the Elder. " Just wait a moment," said the clergyman, 
"let us hear it out : — ' The efficacy of Baptism is not tied to that 
moment of time wherein it is administered ; yet notwithstand- 
ing, by the right use of this ordinance, the grace promised is 
not only offered, but really exhibited and conferred by the Holy 

Ghost.' " " There, I told you so," again interrupted 

the impatient Elder ; "ah! you are all going over to Popery ; 
just what I told you!" "Well, you object to that — what 
have you to say to this ? (Reads) e There is in every sacra- 
ment a Sacramental union between the sign and the thing sig- 
nified Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the 

visible elements in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, do 
then also, inwardly, by faith, really and indeed receive and 



SACRAMENTS. 



75 



feed upon Christ crucified; the body and blood of Christ 
being then, not corporally and carnally, yet as really and truly, 
but spiritually, present to the faith of believers in that ordi- 
nance, as the elements themselves are to their outward senses. 
. ... . And they that worthily communicate, feed Upon his 
body and blood, to their spiritual nourishment and growth in 
grace." " Yes ! there ! I told you so ! I told you so ! All 
Popery ! Popery ! That's what your Oxford men are about ! 
Well, John foretold it all ; " (my friend had been a Presbyterian, 
long enough to know that John was neither the coachman of 
that name, nor the waiter that had answered the bell) ; " what 
is to be, will be ; and John says, that ' the deadly wound,' that 
the Beast got at the Reformation, is to be ' healed,' and all the 
world is again to go after the — I beg your pardon — beast ! " 
" Now, Mr. D.," replied the clergyman, " I have only waited 
to hear your opinions of the passages that I have read ; I 
brought this paper with me this morning, on purpose that you 
might see what your own church teaches, or did teach, when 
she came from the hands of Knox and Calvin and the West- 
minster Divines. Just look and see for yourself ; all that I 
have been reading has been taken from your own Confession of 
Faith" ( The old gentleman takes the hebdomadal and reads 
— -fidgets in his chair — looks into the fire — then looks up at his 
antagonist.) "I don't believe that the Confession of Faith 
teaches any such thing ; I shall not believe it, until I see it." 
[My f'iend draws from his pocket a volume, with a leaf turned 
down at a certain page, and hands it to the Elder — who reads 
a moment— fidgets — looks at the outside of the book— fidgets 
still more — examines the title-page — reads the marked passage 
—fidgets tremendously — gives back the book.) " Well, I can't 
say," said the Elder, " I never saw that in the Confession of 
Faith before ; if it is there, I shall go and ask my minister to 
explain it." " The truth is," said the morning visitor, " you 
Presbyterians formerly held upon these points about the same 



76 



liOOKTNGr FOR THE CHURCH. 



doctrines that we do ; witness the strong language of your own 
Calvin and of Luther — but you have departed from your 
standards, and now imagine, because we adhere to ours, that 
we are going back to Popery. As you glide from the wharf, 
or recede from the shore, you imagine that the land is moving 
from you ; but it is not the land that moves ; it is your ship ; 
the land stands still. In like manner, the Church, the building 
on the Rock stands still. The Church is where it was. It is 
you and your ship that are moving away, and throwing back 
the puny ripple against the everlasting Rock." Suffice it to 
add, that my friend still keeps up his acquaintance at the El- 
der's house, but that the old gentleman is by no means so 
lachrymose on the subject of Popery as formerly. It is said 
that he is waiting with some impatience for that explana- 
tion by his pastor. 

Certain it is, that the Presbyterian Confession of Faith 
(much more the Dutch Reformed and the Lutheran) is as clear 
as the teaching of the Church Catholic, concerning the value 
and efficacy, both of Baptism and of the Lord's Supper. But 
Presbyterians, almost to a man, have departed more widely 
from their standards, on the design and uses of the latter, than 
we have shown them to have done on the benefits and efficacy 
of the former. 

We have seen, that out of the doctrine of election, and of 
regenerating grace and of effectual calling reaching only to 
the elect, has sprung up as a natural growth, the refusal of 
the grace of Baptism to half the purest subjects of the king- 
dom of heaven. But, as if this were not enough for this 
" king of fierce countenance and understanding dark sayings," 
and opening the forbidden leaves of fate, the work of decima- 
tion must go further still. The Presbyterian standards enjoin, 
that " children, born within the pale of the visible Church, 
and dedicated to God in Baptism, when they come to years 
of discretion, if they be free from scandal, appear sober and 



SACRAMENTS. 



77 



steady, and to have sufficient knowledge to discern the Lord's 
body, they ought to be informed, it is their duty and their 
privilege, to come to the Lord's supper." And, for more than 
a hundred years, this order was universally obeyed. But now 
their baptized children are denied "the children's bread," as 
much as if they had been crowned in their infancy with the 
turban or a crescent, or had been devoted in the Ganges to 
the pollutions of Brahma. Only their communicants are com- 
placently addressed as " fellow- citizens with the saints, and 
of the household of faith ;" but all others, without regard to 
Baptism, are treated as " aliens from the commonwealth of 
Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no 
hope, and without God in the world." Such is this mother's 
love, and method of appealing to her children. 

How often are my ears delighted, and my eyes gladdened 
now, to see the kind pastor going back with the youth of his 
flock to the bright fountains, where he had bathed them in the 
morning of life's sultry day, and to hear him speaking, in soft 
and winning tones, of sins forgiven, and of promised grace, 
of the Angel that troubled the waters, and of the Holy Ghost 
that descended like a dove, and of the ministering Spirit that 
hovered near to receive its new charge, when the Lord 
" sware and entered into covenant with them, as he said : In 
the day that thou wast born, and wast cast out on the open 
field, lo, I passed by and pitied thee and threw my skirt over 
thee ; then washed I thee with water, and I girded thee about 
with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk, in the day that 
thou wast born ; I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put 
bracelets upon thine hands, and a chain of pure gold on thy 
neck, and I put a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine 
ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head." 

How often do I now see even " the strong man that keepeth 
his house," successfully resisting every approach, until, behold 
a stronger than he cometh, and by the chain that bound him 

7* 



78 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



when an infant, leading him back to the still waters, where, 
as in a glass, he too may see himself reflected, and how 
changed the crown fallen from his head, and the fine gold be- 
come dim, and the white robe, intended for his resurrection- 
dress, all soiled and rent, and now a deep shade, upon his 
brow once bright with the sign of the cross, and his bosom, 
once peaceful, now swelling high with the fears of eternity ! 
Oh, I have seen " the keepers of the house tremble, and the 
strong men bow themselves," at the recollections of Baptism. 

But long as I was a Presbyterian, I never knew a baptized 
child to be admonished from the pulpit, of any privileges, or 
of any obligations, arising from the fact of Baptism. A bap- 
tized child is taught and trained, precisely as a Baptist would 
train one unbaptized; and a Presbyterian congregation is ad- 
dressed, as if the preacher were declaiming from a Baptist 
pulpit. And why is this, said I, when one apostle has called 
Baptism the Antitype (avTuvnov) of the ark ; and another 
has called it, " the washing of regeneration ; " and he who 
poured water on an apostle's brow, said, " Arise, and be bap- 
tized, and wash away thy sins ; " and He, who sent the same 
Saul to Ananias, said, "Except a man be born of water and 
of the spirit he cannot see the kingdom of God ! " Are there 
two Baptisms — one admitting regenerate adults to all the pri- 
vileges of the church — and the other admitting unregenerate 
infants to nothing ! — Whether they live or die, poor children, 
they fare no better for their Baptism ! The Bible says, " One 
Baptism," as distinctly as it says " One God." The Bible 
declares " Baptized into One Body " as plainly as it proclaims 
" One Lord, One Faith, One Hope." In the Bible, Baptism is 
the door of admission to all other promises and privileges of 
the church. " If you baptize your children, or any part of 
them, why do you not admit them to the Lord's Supper ? " is 
therefore the standing and effective objection of the Baptists. 
The Confession of Faith long ago yielded to its force. Even 



SACRAMENTS. 



79 



Dr. Miller, in the nineteenth century, succumbs to it himself. 
After advising that every means should be employed to retain 
baptized children in the communion of the church, he recom- 
mends, that if, after due admonition, they should continue to 
slight their birthright and neglect the communion ; " they 
should be proceeded with, and cut off, as if they had been 
communicants, and had afterwards apostatized from their pro- 
fession/' But this is all theory. Animum pictura pascit inani. 
The new wine would make those old bottles burst and perish. 
Revivalism and election would go down together. No, Bible- 
baptism can never exist again among Presbyterians ; it can 
never again be the door of entrance upon all the promises and 
privileges of the faithful ; they will do as they have done — 
shut out more than half their little ones from the ark — and 
refuse, except on certain hard conditions, the bread for the 
voyage to few that are admitted. A new departure, I discov- 
ered, from the principles of the Reformation ; let me fly with 
my children to a Church, where these principles are yet 
respected 

But Presbyterians cannot see their church thus falling off 
as under this discipline it must always do, in numbers ; and 
therefore, repudiating the healthy increase by the Scriptural 
method of " discipling and baptizing," they fall into human 
expedients, fraught with amazing opportunities for abuses and 
corruptions, by which the baptized and the unbaptized alike 
are urged on to a crisis, at which they are encouraged to be- 
lieve, that they are born again, in a sense that shall forever 
make temptation essentially powerless, and apostacy utterly 
impossible. Ingenuity is tortured ; new measures are invent- 
ed ; methods still newer and still newer are resorted to, to 
urge the imagination on to the ideal point, at which the ex- 
hausted fancy, in its moment of collapse, " lets go " the world, 
" gives up " its sins and its associates, loses its relish for its 
former ways, yields every point it once disputed ; like the 



80 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



death-bed penitent, when nature is too weak and weary any 
longer to sustain the controversy ; and this collapse, with the 
hysterical relief, and, it may be, ecstacy, that follows it, is 
understood to be the essence of conversion. The soul is now 
supposed to have received the afflatus of an imperishable life, 
so that the person never can fall entirely from grace ; and 
an incorruptible seed of the word is implanted in his under- 
standing, which shall make him personally, and beyond what 
the Pope has ever claimed to be, infallible and indefectible 
in the doctrines of grace ; in a word, because his consci- 
ousness has undergone a strange disturbance, he thinks that he 
has experienced the needful change — " the ictus from beyond 
the fixed stars," as Mr. Bushnell of Hartford, struggling in 
this net himself, has dared recently and manfully to call 
it. I know that many, who have felt as they think, this 
lighting down of the omnipotent arm, are pure and " meet 
for the inheritance with the saints in light." But it was 
not this sudden " ictus from beyond the fixed stars," that 
made them so. They have been under other influences, both 
before and since, that have made them what they are. I have 
been subjected, when a boy, myself, to the startling and elec- 
trifying agency of this species of machinery, and know it, 
even in the most prudent hands to be full of delusion and 
danger. Instead of being the one new birth, it is a regenera- 
tion that may be repeated at every camp-meeting. I have 
known the southern negro, and I have known the illiterate 
white man, to be twice, and thrice, and perhaps twenty times, 
regenerated in this way; although a mind more enlightened or 
better balanced is seldom caught in the snare but once. As 
a Presbyterian, I saw much of such regenerations, and the 
more I saw of them, like Mr. Bushnell, the more I doubted 
them. " What careful ministei*, seeing how many are gath- 
ered around him in the church, who manifest no real love to 
God in the practical duties of life, and have never shown any 



SACRAMENTS. 



81 



Christian character! save that they once were subjects of a 
religious rhapsody, has not often staggered under the suspi- 
cion of some dismal error, in the current views of religious 
experience. For myself, I feel obliged, in faithfulness to God, 
to declare, that I have more than a suspicion on this sub- 
ject/' If the victim ever awake to the delusion, his awak- 
ening will be Jike that of the death bed penitent, who in a 
stormy and troubled hour built his hopes upon the sand — 
too late. The revival convert recovers his composure, — the 
powers of nature are restored, — the passions in their vigor 
return, — the world hangs out its lure, — and lo, the apostacy 
a little while ago pronounced impossible, has taken place ! 
Sad memory here crowds its facts upon me. I will not speak 
of individuals, where troops and scores are rushing on my 
thoughts. I have known a congregation in New- York, of 
four hundred communicants, to disappear, " as the early 
cloud," not even outliving the revival that had given it birth. 
I was myself, in the city of New- York, the pastor of a con- 
gregation, of, nominally, five hundred communicants — the 
fruits, as the phrase was, of " powerful revivals but, when, 
as a shepherd, I made it my first business to " know my 
sheep and to be known of mine," and I sought them diligently 
in the ways and byways, and employed a corps of twenty 
deacons and elders to aid me in the task, and more than 
once read the names of those we could not find to the whole 
body of communicants, and also in a published church-manual 
designated them as missing, and though these inquiries were 
extended through a period little less than a year, one hundred 
and forty communicants could never be found. But what 
roused still more my suspicions respecting this theory of re- 
generation, was the fact, which I personally encountered early 
in my Presbyterian ministry, that the " Campbellites " or 
" Christians," or, to speak properly, S< cinian Baptists, deny- 
ing the Lord that bought them and th< very existence of the 



82 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Holy Ghost, found it no difficult task to equal, and often to 
exceed, the Presbyterian and the Methodist, in the power 
of these "revivals," with singular readiness startling whole 
communities with the same phenomena, filling men's solitude 
with impressions, visions, dreams, and voices, and now num- 
bering, after a career of less than thirty years, between three 
and four hundred thousand converts and communicants! If 
any thing could more than this shake my confidence in such 
a theory of the new birth, it would be a personal knowledge 
of the fact which I only know to be alleged, that similar phe- 
nomena, and especially the transitions from agitation to peace, 
from wild terror to ecstatic rapture, from agony of conscience 
to complete serenity, from actual prostration to actual shout- 
ing, are not at all unfamiliar to certain forms of heathenism 
and of demon-worship. 

The reader will pardon this digression. My object has 
been, without entering on a new subject, merely to call atten- 
tion to the fact, that human expedients have grown up, and 
have become necessary, for the continuance and enlarge- 
ment of the denomination, in sheer consequence of having 
set aside the Scriptural view of the church as a "household 
of faith/' with its " little ones," its " young men," and its 
" fathers," to be perpetuated and extended by the spontane- 
ous increase of itself. The " anxious seat " or the " inquiry 
meeting" has been conceived to possess far more sacramental 
virtue to regenerate than any Baptism. And singular it is, 
that, amidst all the agitations and theories which have shaken 
the Presby terian body, and among all the reformers, that have 
risen to purge and restore their temple, there hath not risen 
one to suggest the restoration of the Sacraments. My own 
awakening on this subject, I owe, by God's blessing, mainly 
to a careful revision of the Confession of Faith, which as a 
minister, I had with great tenderness of conscience subscribed. 
And in this state of mind, with many prayers for the Divine 



SACRAMENTS. 



83 



guidance, in a task so novel, and requiring a measure of wis- 
dom greatly in advance of my years, I prepared for the press 
a treatise on the Sacraments ; which, however, I withheld 
from publication, not only because it would have created one 
frightful element more of distraction, in a body already most 
sadly rent, but also, because I saw reason to fear, that the 
tendencies of Presbyterianism were, et semper et ubique, so 
uncontrollably downward, that it might as soon be expected 
to stop the stars in their courses. Still I wonder, that the 
men, who have undertaken to reclaim that body from the ra- 
tionalistic influences of the new school of theology, have not 
first cast out the beam out of their own eyes. Only by the 
preservation of the Sacraments, will they preserve a vigorous 
theology. The Sacraments are the epitome of Christianity. 
As to the Sacrament of Baptism, we can scarcely say of it, 
stat nominis umbra ; it has got to be regarded, and to be 
called, an unessential " rite/' All idea of its efficacy has 
passed away, with the exploded dogmas of a less enlightened 
age ; and with it, the doctrines of birth- sin, and of the new 
heart, and of regenerating grace descending on the soul, sit 
loosely on the popular mind, and are in danger of ultimate 
extinction. The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ 
has been also degraded into a mere human commemoration ; 
and, with it, the great Catholic doctrine of " a full, perfect 
and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction," as the 
Communion service of the Prayer Book defines it, " for the 
sins of the whole world," is openly excepted to, and, through- 
out New England absolutely lost. I have heard sermons 
upon free will, natural ability, "you can and you can't," the 
modus operandi in regeneration, and other metaphysical sub- 
tleties, until my soul was sick. I have heard sermons about 
some desolating fire ; the stranding of some ship ; the burning 
of some steamboat ; the havoc of some storm ; until fire, air, 
earth, and water, were exhausted. I have heard from the 



84 LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



pulpit lectures upon great social enterprises, fourth -of- July 
orations, discourses on impending elections, eulogiums upon 
associations of men, and harangues upon the revolutions of 
empires and the abdications of princes. I have heard Unita- 
rianism, Popery, Infidelity, dragged in from a distance, to sup- 
ply themes for exciting declamation, and food for morbid ap- 
petites. I have heard sermons and lectures rambling into the 
future, pretending to " understand all prophecy," and helping, 
with startling events to come, to fill up that great moral and 
practical vacuum that Galvanism creates and leaves. But 
never in my whole life, have I heard, from Presb} T terian lips, 
a sermon on the efficacy of the Sacraments : as, for example, 
on the graces, fruits, uses, promises, and helps, of Baptism. 
If Baptism has been ever named, it has been, perhaps amidst 
the heat of a revival, when converts must decide to which sect 
they would belong, or at the request of some unhappy ques- 
tioner, to resist the encroachments of the Baptists, by en- 
deavoring to make good the isolated, naked, cold, historical 
fact, that infants were baptized in. the primitive church, or the 
still less edifying and more difficult assumption, that pouring 
or sprinkling was the common mode of its administration. 
Thus Presbyterians have retained the form, but have long ago 
denied the power of the Sacraments. They perform them 
mechanically. They keep the letter ; they have lost the spirit. 
" The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they 
are truth." Qui manet in litera, hc&ret in cortice. For my- 
self, I went further in my own teaching, and well recollect, 
that one of my elders took me severely to task, in presence 
of his peers, for calling the Sacrament of infants, what Dr. 
Alexander has called it in the extract lately quoted, " holy 
Baptism." Still I preached the gospel of grace, and the grace 
of the gospel, in the Sacraments, and was able to do it in the 
language of their own confession, that " there is in every Sa- 
crament a sacramental union between the sign and the thing 



SACRAMENTS. 



85 



signified." But like the Baptist in the desert, I was preach- 
ing to the rocks. When I asked them of the doctrine, " Is it 
from heaven, or of men ? " they reasoned, I suppose, among 
themselves ; " If we shall say, From heaven, he will say, why 
then do ye not bring all your little ones to Baptism ? but if 
we shall say, of men, he will say, why then do ye bring any?" 
So that, although Presbyterians appear to have two Baptisms 
— one proclaiming that the adult is regenerate, and is now 
an heir of the promises of God — the other, implying only, 
that the infant either needs regeneration, or will need it at 
some future time, according as the animus imponentis is Pe- 
lagian or Calvinistic ; and, although they seem to have a Sa- 
crament in the Lord's Supper, yet, denying it the " efficacy " 
ascribed to it in their Confession, as a " means of grace" it 
is perfectly clear, that they have after all, and strictly speak- 
ing no Sacrament at all. Not once in a thousand times do 
they grant Baptism to the dying penitent ; not once in a thou- 
sand more, do they allow the Lord's Supper to the dying be- 
liever. The one is sent unwashed into the presence of his 
God ; the other unfed into the solitudes and wastes of death. 
Both are compelled to violate, in the dying hour, the com- 
mands of Christ ; while the living look on, and with easy apt- 
ness learn, that Sacraments may be neglected both by the 
living and the dying, as entirely unnecessary to salvation. 



CONFIRMATION- 



CHAPTER VII. 
r — lord's supper EXCOMMUNICATION. 



Let us now suppose the child, baptized or unbaptized— it 
makes no difference with the Presbyterian, to have reached the 
next stage in life. We suppose him to be one of the elect, 
and to have received, at the " appointed time," that irresistible 
ictus of regeneration, for the want of which all the good 
things of his whole life before have been counted as evil, and 
by virtue of which, all the sins of his life afterward shall be 
so far counted to him for good, that they can no more 
" quench the spirit/' than they can quench the stars, no more 
separate him from the favor of God, than they can separate 
him from his own existence. 

He is now to " make a profession of religion, by the recep- 
tion of the Sacrament." We stay not to find fault with the 
phraseology. We stop only to ask men who profess to be 
guided by the Bible alone, where in that book it is, that they 
find the " taking the Sacrament " — unless by that they mean 
the sacrament of Baptism — the authorized mode of " making 
a profession of religion ? " 

We suppose our candidate to have passed one ordeal in 
those agitating experiences, which so often rend and tear, 
and as if the evil one went out of them, are the accompani- 
ments and signs of this species of regeneration. He has now 
to pass a more dread ordeal than the former, in relating these 



CONFIRMATION. 



87 



experiences to the company of the elders, or, if his lot have 
fallen among the Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the 
like, to the whole body of communicants. These elders, as 
my predecessor in a Presbyterian Parish is said to have re- 
marked, have been sometimes "made when timber was 
scarce/' and, like annuitants, of course they never die. Al- 
beit, I knew an instance, in which one died, and with a dry 
smile and sigh the good man's pastor remarked to me, that it 
was one of those seeming afflictions by which the Lord works 
great deliverances for his people. Can we wonder, that 
men of education and fine feeling, shrink from a catechizing 
by a bench of elders? If they hesitate for months and years 
and even until the end of life — of which we have known ma- 
ny a striking instance — are we, therefore, to set it down as 
evidence of some irregularity in their conversion? Or, sup- 
pose these elders to be grave, dignified, well-read, capable 
of voting intelligently, when " deep answers to deep " in 
theological debate, and ministers may be on trial for ab- 
struse opinions, that are supposed to involve and sap the 
foundations of religion — it is evident that in presence of 
such a company, the diffident and meritorious, the meek and 
humble babe in Christ will appear as a lamb before her shear- 
ers ; while the rash and the vain will but reap assurance, from 
passing with the more eclat, the inquisitive — 1 might not err 
in calling it, inquisitorial conclave. 

Thousands there are, to whom this " going before the Ses- 
sion," as the phrase is, to relate their experience, has haunted 
their lying down and their rising up, more than auricular con- 
fession has ever disturbed the papist, and, on the eve of the 
communion, when, above all other seasons, the mind should 
be quiet and self-possessed, has had a most painful influence 
in distracting and tormenting it. And scarcely a pastor but 
bewails the fact that, having passed this ordeal, his converts 
live thenceforth as light-hearted as if the day of judgment 



88 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



were appointed only to unseal and publish the verdict of the 
elders. And the monthly and quarterly repetitions of experi- 
ence, and confessions in classes, under a complete system of 
espionage, adopted by the Methodists, is but a poor remedy 
for these pernicious results. 

It has often been the case, that these elders in session have 
felt themselves moved to pry into private histories with unne- 
cessary and annoying interrogatories. One of their own min- 
isters has complained, that the conditions or tests of commu- 
nion, have erected around the sacramental table in some of 
their churches, " a fence ten rails high/' I have heard the 
modest maiden interrogated whether she belonged to a tem- 
perance society, and I have seen an indignant woman refuse 
to answer whether she drank intoxicating liquors. The purity 
of this page reminds me, that here I must arrest my pen. 
But I do so with the question, " Quid domini facient, audent 
cum taliafures?" If in a decent congregation, and against 
the minister's remonstrance, these impertinent questions have 
been asked, what may not be done, and what rights may not 
be trampled under foot, where the reins are thrown loose up- 
on the neck ? The legislation of these elders will admit a 
candidate to the Communion, at this moment, in one thousand 
congregations, only under the Nazarite and Popish vow of 
eternal abstinence from wine ; and it is blazoned for the in- 
formation and admiration of all mankind, that wine is now 
prohibited, even on their altars, in more than eight hundred 
churches. My spirit went heavily within me ; it was more 
than I could bear. Compared with such arbitrary and irre- 
sponsible tyranny, to which there can be neither law nor limit, 
and which may forge new oppressions to-morrow, as it has 
invented these but yesterday, Rome, with its fixed and ascer- 
tainable exactions, is still gloriously free. 

But now the experience is told, and the conclave adjourned. 
There frequently remains a third ordeal to be passed, by the 



CONFIRMATION. 



89 



baptized and the unbaptized alike, before partaking of the 
Lord's supper. The candidate, in face of the congregation, 
is to answer a series of questions, embodying, in some in- 
stances, nice metaphysical subtleties, that chanGe to feed the 
controversies of the hour ; while the questions themselves are 
sometimes extemporaneously put, but are more commonly 
agreed upon, under the local and joint counsels of the pastor 
and the elders. To produce uniformity in this particular, a 
living divine, whose confidence I am not betraying in stating 
the fact, was a few years ago employed in preparing a con- 
fession — for creed-making is not yet at an end, and will live 
the lifetime of Popery and Sectarianism — to be adopted by 
the General Assembly, for the admission of communicants 
throughout the church. He proposed also — owing, I believe, 
the suggestion to myself — that the new formulary should 
clearly recognize the distinction between the unbaptized and 
the baptized. Such a measure was not likely to succeed ; in 
fact, it failed. 

With regard to this mode of admission to the Lord's sup- 
per, it is worthy of remark, that the whole thing is an inno- 
vation upon Presbyterianism, and although borrowed along 
with some other matters from the Congregationalists, within 
the short period of thirty years, has become almost every- 
where prevalent. And the rapid spread of such a usage from 
parish to parish, demonstrated to my mind, many a year ago, 
the conscious want, throughout the church, of a connecting link 
between Baptism and the Communion, to ratify the vows and 
pledges of the former, and to conduct the maturing Christian 
to the grace and consolation of the latter. I certainly must 
have felt that want myself, when, thirteen years ago, in the 
printed formulary which I composed for the reception of new 
candidates to the communion, I used the following language : 
" You acknowledge the responsibilities whereunto you were 
appointed in Baptism, in which you forever renounced the 

8* 



90 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



world, the flesh, and the devil, and consecrated in a perpetual 
covenant jour body, soul, and spirit, &c, .... (Assent.) 
. . . . This being the faith wherein you have witnessed a 
good confession before many witnesses, and as, from the be- 
ginning, you have been baptized into the privileges and pro- 
mises of the Church Catholic, therefore I now pronounce and 
constitute you members of the body in which we worship the 
Father, and welcome you to share our grace and tribulation. 
And as we open before you to day the higher and wider mys- 
teries of the kingdom in another ordinance, and confirm you 
in the covenant of the faithful, we beseech you, as strangers 
and pilgrims, &c." 

When looking, in those days, at the baptized child, insensi- 
ble to the responsibilities, and indifferent to the grace, accru- 
ing from his Baptism, or purposely taught, it may have been, 
to regard that Baptism as the lowest and merest rite of Chris- 
tianity — forgetting that Christianity has in this respect no 
such rites, as had the Jewish faith before it, but has merged 
the shadow into the substance, and rites into realities — 1 have 
been often unable to check the thought, that, if Presbyterians 
had retained the use of Confirmation, it would not only have 
answered for an edifying link between Baptism and the Com- 
munion, but it would have brought many a baptized child, 
year after year, into personal contact with his pastor, and 
would have afforded a golden opportunity, in youth's fearful 
crisis, for admonition, for reproof, for instruction in the dan- 
gers and responsibilities of life. It seemed reasonable — so 
reasonable, that infant Baptism seemed incomplete without it, 
and unconnected with the after-life — by some solemn form to 
ask the child, now coming to the years of wisdom and dis- 
cretion, " Do you abide by the terms on which you were bap- 
tized ? " and, if the answer justified it, to renew the comfort- 
ing assurance, that God would enlarge his grace, and most 



CONFIRMATION. 



91 



surely keep and perform the promises, which He for His part 
had vouchsafed to make. 

About the same time, I ascertained, that Presbyterians, in 
portions of Germany and other countries, had not cast off the 
rite of Confirmation. Luther retained it, and his followers 
retain it still. " I sincerely wish," said Calvin, " that we re- 
tained this custom of imposition of hands, which was prac- 
tised amongst the ancients." Beza and Owen and Adam 
Clarke speak in much the same strain. I had seen clergy- 
men also in our own Communion, who would not have been 
unwilling to see the rite restored. Such facts induced me to 
look into the scriptural authority for this intervening ordi- 
nance between Baptism and the Holy Supper. For if any 
such rite be necessary for us, and if we betray our conscious 
want of it in the adoption of an awkward substitute, it could 
not have been less necessary in the times of the apostles, and 
we might therefore expect to find something in the word of 
God, beautifully intervening, as the connecting link, between 
the two Sacraments. 

"To the law then and to the testimony" — -what saith it? 
" Leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on 
unto perfection ; not laying again the foundation of repent- 
ance from dead works, and of faith toward God, of the doc- 
trine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of the resur- 
rection of the dead, and of eternal judgment." (Heb. vi. 1- 
2.) According to this, " the foundation " — " the principles of 
the doctrine of Christ " — what are they ? " Repentance — 
Faith — Baptisms — Laying on of hands — the Resurrection — 
the eternal Judgment." For the first time in my life, I here 
saw that Christianity had filled the vacancy between the Sa- 
craments, and had assigned a solemn rite to its place next 
after Baptism — the very place to which the human invention of 
a confession in broad aisle had been assigned by Congrega- 
tionalists and Presbyterians. First, " Repentance ;" secondly, 



92 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



"Faith ;" thirdly, "Baptisms," (whether that of John, or that 
of Jesus, or that of the Holy Trinity, or the double washing 
with water and the Spirit, or the trine immersion, which 
some allege to have been primitive,) fourthly, " Laying on of 
hands." Let me think, said I within myself ; — is this the or- 
der of teaching among the Presbyterians ? They teach, first, 
Repentance ; very well ; for St. Paul says, first, " Repentance." 
They teach, secondly, Faith ; very well again ; for St. Paul 
says, secondly, " Faith." They teach, thirdly, Baptism; very 
well once more ; for St. Paul says, thirdly, " Baptisms" But, 
at the fourth stage, St. Paul and the Presbyterians part ; St. 
Paul says, fourthly, " the Laying on of hands ;" Presbyterians 
break the chain, binding our youthful Isaacs to the altar, and 
our young Samuels to the temple, and cast the bright link 
away. 

As a Presbyterian, I had nothing to gain, by supposing 
that ordination, was in the apostle's mind as a matter to be 
inculcated on a young convert next after Baptism, and in 
company with the tremendous doctrines, of repentance, faith, 
resurrection, and judgment. I came therefore to the conclu- 
sion, from which only an unnatural straining and dislocating 
of the passage could offer an escape, that St. Paul was speak- 
ing of the sacramental rite, or, if you please, the lesser sacra- 
ment, of Confirmation, coming next after Baptism, and filling 
up one of the confessed and conscious vacancies of Galvan- 
ism. Again, my attention was struck with the fact, that 
Baptism, and the Laying on of hands, were, in the apostle's 
estimation, of sufficient excellence and dignity, to lie at " the 
foundation" and to be written down among the tremendous 
" doctrines " of " Repentance — Faith — the Resurrection — and 
the Judgment." What ! Baptism mentioned in the same 
breath with Faith ! the Laying on of hands raised to a cor- 
relative dignity with the Resurrection and the eternal Judg- 
ment ! and both this and that lying at the foundation, where 



CONFIRMATION. 



93 



an apostle is deliberately reciting " which be the first prin- 
ciples of the doctrine of Christ ! " Make of the passage 
what ye will, it falls upon our ears much more like the natural 
utterance of the Episcopal Church, than the teaching of 
Presbyterianism in the nineteenth century. 

But did not " the Laying on of hands " impart' the gift of 
tongues and miracles ? Yes ; and it was necessary that it 
should; that the infant Church might understand, at once, 
the sacramental nature of the ordinance. For the same rea- 
son, Baptism was at first, accompanied by the visible de- 
scending of a dove, that its sacramental character, the spirit 
brooding on the waters, might be a fixed and understood fact ; 
so that apostles might preach, " Repent, and be baptized, 
every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remis- 
sion of sins, and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost." In like 
manner, Ordination was accompanied at first by the commu- 
nication of the gift of miracles, even to the humblest deacon, 
that it might be an understood and settled principle of Chris- 
tianity, that each vocation in the church should receive by 
the laying on of hands its proportion of grace. In the same 
Way also, the first preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles 
was marked by visible and audible effusions of the spirit, to 
establish the fundamental principles that the wall was broken 
down between the Jew and the Gentile. For the same rea- 
son, Confirmation at first had its " signs following," that the 
Christian, in confirming the pledges of his Baptism, might be 
assured of his own confirmation in grace, by a new afflatus 
of the Holy Ghost, for the higher responsibilities of the Chris- 
tian life. Thus, in the city of Samaria, Philip, not the apos- 
tle, but the deacon, "one of the seven," we are told, preached 
to the people, and baptized a great multitude, " both men and 
women." More he was not empowered to do. But " when 
the apostles, which were at Jerusalem, heard that Samaria 
had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and 



94 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



John, who, when they were come down — laid their hands on 
them, and they received the Holy Ghost." Philip, the deacon, 
converted and baptized them, " both men and women ;" Pe- 
ter and John came down, and "laid their hands on them" — 
certainly not to ordain them, for it says, "both men and 
women." This was a rite that Simon Magus had never be- 
fore seen ; Philip had been there, preaching, baptizing, and 
working miracles, healing, we are told, the paralytic and the 
lame, and ejecting devils with wonderful success. But 
Simon, whom Philip baptized, and who " continued with 
Philip," never saw, until those that ordained the seven deacons 
came into Samaria, this rite of the imposition of hands. 
" And when Simon saw," says the narrative, " that, through 
laying on of the apostles' hands, the Holy Ghost was given, 
he offered," &c. (See Acts viii, 5-19.) We cannot see how 
the force of these simple facts can be evaded ; and we set 
Confirmation down as one of the things which Presbyterian- 
ism has irrevocably lost. - 

Some of my ministerial brethren, I knew entertained upon 
this subject, a similar impression to my own. Presbyterian 
reviewers, I observed, and even gentlemen at Princeton, and 
in the Princeton Quarterly, touched tenderly upon the topic. 
The whole Lutheran church retained the practice. Those 
Protestants who had laid it aside, were already all feeling 
after something to supply the vacuum. I could not find, in 
antiquity, any beginning to this " Laying on of hands," but at 
the hands of the apostles. I would trace it beyond the apos- 
tles to the Jewish synagogue, where I could find it even to 
this day intervening between circumcision and the passover. 
I heard of it in the remotest East ; in the heart of Abyssinia ; 
in the fastnesses of Carmel and of Syria. I was glad that 
my children had been baptized and introduced before me into 
a fold, that would thus again throw its protecting shield of 



CONFIRMATION. 



95 



Confirmation around them, when they should arrive at the 
years of discretion and of danger. 

And if I was glad in the anticipation, what tongne, shall 
express my happiness in the result. One of those little ones ; 
the first that was given me, and the first that I gave the 
Church; is now among them that sleep in Jesus. In the 
glow of childhood — in her fifteenth year- — an age, when 
among Presbyterians, the minister is avoided, and the ap- 
proach of a zealous elder dreaded and shunned ; she express- 
ed the usual desire to be confirmed, at the next visitation of 
the Bishop. As her father was beyond the sea, her friends 
advised her to await his return. But, with the grace already 
given her, she urged her request very importunely ; and it 
brought her at once under the teachings and counsels of a 
judicious and affectionate clergyman. She was accordingly 
confirmed, under the most gratifying appearances of sincerity 
and earnestness. A new measure of the spirit evidently 
rested upon her from that hour ; she spoke in a sweeter 
tongue ; she led a more heavenly life : not noisy, but still ; 
not ostentatious, but retiring ; not even conscious was she of 
the impression made upon her heart and life, nor of that im- 
pression so sweetly reflected upon those around her. The 
solemn litanies of the Church were often observed to bring 
tears into her eyes ; the church's fasts were her most pleasant 
feasts ; morning, and evening, and at noonday, she was many 
a tune observed to dwell long upon her knees ; often was she 
known to retire from the midst of her young companions to 
the exercises of the closet ; and such a life of gentleness and 
holiness, and self-denial, and prayer, and humble usefulness, 
and cheerfulness, it has never been my lot to know in one so 
young. And God has rewarded it. Within a year from the 
time that she knelt under the Bishop's hands, she entered joy- 
fully into the rest, for which she had been unconsciously ma- 
turing ; and was " so blessed, she blessed the hand of death." 



96 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



And often have I been consoled in the reflection that Con- 
firmation in a father's absence, espoused her by a new vow to 
Christ, just at the moment when the world first comes to claim 
the virgin-heart. What a happy opportunity it gives, in all 
times and climes, to bring the influences of religion to bear 
upon youth's generous affections! The father may be far 
away, and the mother sleeping in the dust; yet the Church is 
a mother that dies never ; and the time comes round, the op- 
portunity comes up, at the most critical period of life, for the 
hallowed associations, counsels, and instructions, incident to 
Confirmation. If I have introduced a case in illustration of 
this important point, it has been not without violence to my 
more tender recollections of a precious child ; but as, in a 
former chapter, I had told of her Baptism, I have now, for a 
higher purpose, permitted myself to record her Confirmation 
and her end. And, to extend the illustration, I may add, that, 
during the six years of my Presbyterian ministry, not an indi- 
vidual, so far as I can recollect, seemed drawn toward me for 
counsel, or attracted onward by the arrangements and natural 
leadings of the system, to assume the responsibilities of Bap- 
tism. If an inquirer came to me, he came not from the gen- 
tler drawings of the common influences around him, (for Cal- 
vinism knows no gentleness,) but from some sudden ictus or 
impulse, that happened to him alone, and left hundreds undis- 
turbed behind him. In contrast with this, during the first six 
years of my ministry in the Episcopal Church, more than six 
hundred baptized souls have come spontaneously within my 
personal reach and private counsels, for the ratification of the 
tremendous vows of Baptism. Some of them have been 
among my dearest friends on earth, towards whom I might 
otherwise have felt a reserve in offering religious advice ; and 
hundreds, I have reason to believe, have thus been brought 
under my secret counsels, whom otherwise I should never 
have reached. Really, without Confirmation, or its positive 



CONFIRMATION. 



97 



equivalent, bringing back the infant to the altar, not only 
would infant Baptism appear cumbered with a real difficulty, 
but the provisions of Christianity would seem obviously in- 
complete. 

Let us now go back to our candidate for the Communion. 
He has passed the ordeals of conversion, the confession to the 
elders, and the open profession in the congregation. Why 
he is not now baptized, to signify that he is born again, I can- 
not understand, except on the Pelagian hypothesis, that Bap- 
tism may be lawfully administered in anticipation of a possi- 
ble future event But why the person should not be now 
baptized, who is loud in reiterating, I had almost said, in glo- 
rying, that his Baptism in infancy " never did him any good " 
— a boast, and sometimes uttered in the form of challenge, 
which I have often heard— I leave for the elders and their 
minister to answer. And why the Anabaptist, who hesitates 
not to re-baptize an individual, though priest, prelate, or pope, 
may have baptized him in his infancy, on the assumption that 
he was baptized before he was born again or before he be- 
lieved, does not re-immerse the grown up man, who, although 
he was immersed at twenty or at forty, now solemnly de- 
clares that the same mistake was perpetrated upon him, and 
that he too was immersed before he believed, and that his for- 
mer immersion, so far from doing him any good, published to 
the world a lie, is entirely beyond my comprehension. 

But, to follow our candidate to the Communion. If ever in 
his life he felt like lying low under the droppings of that most 
precious blood here flowing from the cross, it is now ; but 
prostration is forbidden him, and his knees are not allowed to 
come in contact with the dust. If ever he desired to draw 
nigh and cling to the horns of the altar, it is to-day ; but he 
is required to sit aloof from the table of the show-bread that 
showeth forth the Lord's death until He come. And, instead 
of receiving the emblem's of his Saviour's own body and 

9 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



blood, from that good man's hand, who perhaps received him 
when a little one in the person and the name of Christ, or 
who has led him in after years to Christ ; and, instead of 
hearing a paternal voice speaking in words of comfort, and 
uttering a pastor's blessing, he is compelled to take the hal- 
lowed elements from hands that yesterday he saw employed 
in the counting-room, or in the market-place, or in occupa- 
tions which the dignity of my subject will not suffer me to 
name. If out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speak- 
eth; if a clean heart will naturally robe itself in a clean 
dress ; so a true Christianity, properly alive to the purity and 
dignity and majesty of that worship in which Angels and 
Archangels join with men, must instinctively loathe this 
slovenly appearance, and these familiar manners, and, if she 
have more beautiful garments, although she can never mistake 
them for the beating heart and living soul within, will surely 
put them on, to appear before her King. 

In early life, I had, at the south, been used to see the sa- 
cramental table spread, and the guests seated decorously 
around it. Princeton, which should have been the last place 
on earth, was the very first, in which I saw the communicants 
receive the elements while seated in their pews. I shall never 
forget the violence done to my feelings, and not to mine only, 
but to those of several others by this spectacle ; a chill crept 
over me, a chill that returned as often as the festival came 
back ; and I felt, because it was true, although I knew it not, 
that the sacramental character of the solemnity was vanish- 
ing away. Those very churches at the south, which, in my 
youth, or fifteen years ago, celebrated the Lord's supper with 
much decency and reverence around a table spread with the 
fair linen cloth, have been unable, even in the matter of " rue 
and mint and cummin," to resist the irruptions of the north- 
men, and have engrafted on their old, venerable forms, the 
rude and freezing usages of New England Congregationalism. 



lord's supper. 



99 



But so it is. Downward, and downward still, is the course 
of a system, that has once broken away from the unalterable 
past. Chilly, and more chilly still, becomes the atmosphere 
of a body, that has once left the warm orbit to which nature 
had assigned it. 

I had noticed, when a boy, as the communicants in suc- 
cessive companies approached the table, that certain individ- 
uals waited their opportunity to secure the places immediately 
on the pastor's right and left, that they might receive the 
communion immediately at his hands ; thus clearly betraying 
the natural working of a pious instinct. Later in life I reach- 
ed the question : Why not indulge the generous desire, and 
kneel, and receive at the pastor's hand, and with the pastor's 
blessing, these seals of grace ? Who would feel contented, 
that some tradesman should pour the water on his head, in 
Baptism, while the minister should say the sacramental 
words ? And who should feel satisfied, to receive " that bread 
and that cup," from a merchant's or a tradesman's hands ? 
Does it require a high degree of Christian reverence, to feel 
instinctively, through every fibre of the soul, a deep repug- 
nance to such familiarity? " Is it not the communion of the 
body of Christ ? Is it not the communion of the blood of 
Christ?" We feel that the minister is the only proper indi- 
vidual, to impart the water in Baptism ; is he not the only 
proper and lawful person, to impart "that bread and that 
cup," wherein, it will be to our everlasting condemnation, if 
we " discern not the Lord's body." And why not also kneel, 
thought I, in the one Sacrament, as well as in the other? 
Adult candidates for Presbyterian baptism generally kneel. 
Candidates for Presbyterian ordination invariably kneel. 
Why not approach as near His sacred feet as I can, and kneel 
as lowly as I wish, in receiving " the true bread from heaven," 
while this sacrifice of Melchizedec, the bread and the wine, 
show the Lord's death upon the table, and plead for my soul 



100 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



with a fervour and a purity, which my own prayers are inca- 
pable of approximating? If it be objected, that kneeling may 
beget too much reverence for the symbols, we only answer, 
for the present, that sitting may beget the more dangerous too 
little. For more than a thousand years, there were but two 
upon earth, that sat at the communion ; one of these was the 
Arian, " who, denying the divinity of the Saviour, thought it 
not robbery to be equal with Him at His table ;" the other 
was, and yet is, the Pope of Rome, who, claiming the same 
equality in another and higher, although it is fair to remem- 
ber, not in the highest sense, receives the Communion on cer. 
tain occasions, in the posture of the Presbyterians. Treat 
the symbols with irreverence, and irreverence toward Him, 
whom they represent, will inevitably follow. Already, in this 
respect, are the Presbyterians where the Arians were once, 
and the Unitarians are now. 

Again. As the Episcopal arrangements bring every child 
of the congregation, just at the moment when the world 
breaks enticingly upon his eye, and whispers her meretricious 
flattery into his ear, and makes her resolute descent upon his 
heart, into personal intimacy with his pastor, in the prepara- 
tory steps to confirmation, so does the Episcopal mode of 
celebrating the Holy Eucharist, bring each communicant, 
many times a year, under the immediate eye 6f his pastor, 
who thus possesses the invaluable opportunity of noticing the 
absent, of kindling anew his interest in each communicant 
present, and of cherishing a personal acquaintance with them 
all. Under such a discipline, a fact like the one already 
stated would have been utterly impossible, that one hundred 
and forty communicants, or nearly one-third of the whole 
number in a parish, should have been lost sight of, from the 
recollections of the elders of the whole body of parishioners. 
But so it ever is ; under the workings of a true system, every 
thing falls naturally into its place, and harmony and beauty 



DISCIPLINE. 



101 



and propriety are in all its parts; the machine regulates 
itself; the jar is not felt; anarchy is impossible. And, when 
the little things of a church, as we may perhaps consider them, 
like the joints and bands of the body, seem to be fitly framed 
together and to fill the very place that without them would 
be unseemly blanks, and to perform their minute offices in 
mutual and self-adjusting harmony, it would appear, that, as 
in Ezekiel's vision, "the spirit of a living creature was 
among the whole." 

And when the painful necessity for discipline arises, al- 
though it be for sins that should not be named, Congrega- 
tional Presbyterianism invests the whole body of communi- 
cants — male and female — young men and maidens — the wise 
and the unwise — the silent and the gossipping — with the equal 
right of investigating and pronouncing; while a numerous 
eldership, according to the theory of Presbyterians proper, 
neutralizes but a portion of this evil. How much more likely to 
be salutary are the private " admonitions " and " repellings " 
of Episcopacy. And under the Episcopal regimen, if an ap- 
peal be taken, it is conducted with the same delicacy and 
consideration, and with greater probabilities of rectifying mis- 
takes, up to the Bishop ; whereas, among Presbyterians, it must 
be dragged into open Presbyteries, and thence to Synods, 
and thence again to General Assemblies, where hundreds of 
ministers have lost hundreds of days, in adjusting some petty 
wrong, or in adjusting a neighborhood-quarrel in some remote 
and miserable village. And any attempt, such as an eminent 
divine among them has suggested, to arrest these appeals at 
the lower courts, is but an interference with the liberties of 
the people, and a departure from the Presbyterian theory. 
We shall not in this place notice that feature of Presbyteri- 
anism, which all jurists have established as the definition and 
essence of tyranny, and which places the sword, the sceptre, 
and the purse in the same hands ; and combines the legisla- 

9* 



102 



LOOKIXG FOR THE CHURCH. 



tive, the judicial, and the executive functions, in the same 
body ; so that the General Assembly, for example, is, at the 
same moment, legislature, jury, judge, executive and execu- 
tioner. 

The Confession of Faith declares, that " to the officers of 
the Church the keys of the kingdom of heaven are commit- 
ted, by virtue whereof they have power respectively to retain 
and remit sins, to shut that kingdom against the impenitent 
sinners, by the ministry of the gospel, and by absolution from 
censures, as occasion shall require." Rome itself has scarcely 
a more terrific form of anathema than that which Knox, the 
reformer, devised, nor a more soothing absolution than the 
two, which the curious in such matters may see in the Litur- 
gy which he prepared for the adoption of the Presbyterians 
in Scotland, but which ultimately fell of course, into disuse. 
But, now, the individual, thus assailed by a church censure, 
may laugh at the elders for their pains, and "join" some 
other of the sects which lie so numerously about his door. 
What is to prevent him ? They are all " churches " — standing 
on the same basis of private judgment — equally pure ; equally 
spiritual ; equally free. Every day this evasion is actually 
practiced. I once knew a man, who, having lost a sum of 
money, was induced to consult one of those gifted individuals, 
that, not two centuries ago would have graced the stake or 
the gallows upon the shores of Massachusetts Bay. The 
good lady gave him information certainly very remarkable, 
and ventured some predictions, afterward most singularly 
verified. With this, however, my story has nothing to do. 
But out of the occurrence, an offence grew up, which made 
it necessary for the Presbyterian clergyman to excommuni- 
cate some two or three persons. The very day and hour of 
their excommunication, they were immersed by a Baptist 
preacher, and received triumphantly to the communion. A 
few years afterward, the same individuals were excommuni- 



EXCOMMUNICATION. 



103 



cated by their new brethren, and became, and are now, mem- 
bers of the Campbellite sect, " in good and regular standing." 
Thus are the keys so held among the sects, that as one door 
of the kingdom is shut, another may be immediately opened. 

This result of sectarian discipline is not varied, by enlarg- 
ing the sphere of its operation. For, within a few years, we 
have seen whole synods, embracing sixty thousand communi- 
cants, " exscinded " from the Presbyterian church, and forth 
with investing themselves anew with all the prerogatives of a 
Church of God. An ejected Presbytery, a Presbytery still ; 
an exscinded Synod, a Synod still; an excommunicated 
Church, a Church still ; standing on the conceded basis of 
private judgment — tota teres atque rotunda — equally pure ; 
equally scriptural ; equally competent to hold the keys ; and 
with plenary right and plenary power, to originate a ministry, 
and celebrate sacraments, as valid as if the twelve apostles 
had risen from their graves, and had laid on them their con- 
secrating hands. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



LITURGIES. 



However well-proportioned I might have found the Epis- 
copal Church in its structure ; however safe-guarded against 
the outbreaks of fanaticism, and the incursions of heresy; 
however high her walls, or beautiful her gates, or strong her 
towers ; however studded her whole frame-work with the in- 
scriptions of the earliest ages; although on every portal I 
should have seen a martyr's name, and on every column the 
handwriting of an Ignatius or a Polycarp ; yet I may confess, 
that all this symmetry and beauty, if it were possible that 
they should exist as a body without a spirit, ought to a devout 
mind, to present no irresistible attraction, if, upon closer in- 
spection, the interior arrangements were found unfriendly to 
the great end to which every thing else in the temple must be 
secondary and subservient — the high and pure devotions of 
the heart. As in human friendships, we value not the lip's 
cold words without the heart's warm love, so, with an em- 
phasis beyond comparison, as " God is a Spirit," " they that 
worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth." But 
I have supposed a thing impossible. It cannot be, that 

c< On the cold cheek of Death smiles and roses are blending." 

Such symmetry and beauty as we have described, are the 
results of a life within ; as the beautiful flower is the sponta- 



LITURGIES. 



105 



neous evolution of a healthy seed, or as the proportions of a 
fair edifice are the developments of cultivated thought and 
feeling, or as the beauty and perfection of the material body 
are but the natural expression of an instinctive and vigorous 
life. As Nature, however, ever seeks a clothing verdant, 
bright, radiant with its Maker's image, so a true Christianity 
will lay aside the swaddling-clothes for the robe without 
seam, and in all that is external will exhibit strength, sym- 
metry and beauty. I can, however, recal the time when 
Episcopacy was, to me, "the sepulchre, beautiful indeed, 
without, but full within," if not of Death's corruption, at least 
of Death's cold chill, and stiffened form ; when lip-service 
and Episcopacy were as much convertible terms as Presbyter 
and Bishop were, in the New Testament. But this was at a 
time when I set a less relative value upon the worship of the 
sanctuary, than I have been led by God's blessing, since to 
do ; at a time when I knew less of Episcopalians than I 
came, by God's Providence, afterward to know; at a time 
when I had not carefully observed the workings of the human 
mind with reference to liturgical worship, nor the influences 
of liturgical worship upon the human mind. If I found my- 
self, or if I found others unprofited, or often pained and injured, 
by the crudities and defects of extemporaneous worship, to 
have sought relief in the Episcopal Liturgy, would, to me, have 
seemed like stepping from the regions of an occasional north 
wind, upon a zone of everlasting ice. Let me, then, conduct 
the reader along the line of reflection which brought me to 
the conclusion, that, agreeably to the analogies of the faith, 
as grace comes down to man, robed in the Sacraments and 
the Word in an external Ministry, and Christianity itself in 
the written Scriptures, so a permanent devotion will inevitably 
clothe itself in an abiding Liturgy. 

I might here, at the outset, entrench myself behind a host 
of mighty names, that, having used a Liturgy through all their 



106 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



lives, had every opportunity to know its value, and have left 
a testimony which the Rev. Mr. Staunton has thus condensed : 
" Blame us not, then, if we value our Liturgy ; it embodies the 
anthems of saints ; it thrills the heart with the dying songs 
of the faithful ; it is hallowed with the blood of the martyrs ; 
it glows with sacred fire." I prefer to throw into the fore- 
ground of my argument the testimony of Presbyterians them- 
selves. 

Even Mr. Barnes, in a candid moment, and before his eu- 
logium (of which we quote but a small part) had led any of 
his flock to seek our green pastures, and our still waters, per- 
mitted himself to say, " We have always thought that there 
are Christian minds and hearts, that would find more edifica- 
tion in the forms of worship in that Church than in any other. 
We have never doubted that many of the purest flames of de- 
votion that rise from the earth, ascend from the altars of the 
Episcopal Church, and that many of the purest spirits that the 
earth contains, minister at those altars, or breathe forth their 
prayers and praises in language consecrated by the use of 
piety for centuries." 

The Xew-York Christian Observer, the representative of 
the Dutch Reformed Church in this country, says of the Epis- 
copal Church. " Her spirit-stirring Liturgy, and a scrupulous 
adherence to it, have, under God, preserved her integrity be- 
yond any denomination of Christians since the Reformation." 

Says a Scottish Presbyterian, the Rev. John Cummings, "I 
shall never forget how thrilling I felt one clause in the Eng- 
lish Liturgy, on my first entering an Episcopal Church. It is 
perhaps the finest sentence and the sweetest prayer in the lan- 
guage : — 1 In all time of our tribulation ; in all time of our 
prosperity; in the hour of death and in the Day of Judgment, 
Good Lord, deliver us.' " 

Dr. Doddridge, an English Presbyterian and Expositor, 
says, " The language is so plain as to be level to the capacity 



LITURGIES. 



107 



of the meanest, and yet the sense is so noble, as to raise the 
capacity of the highest." 

Dr. Clarke, the distinguished Commentator of the Metho- 
dists, declares it " superior to every thing of the kind produced 
either by ancient or modern times ; several of the prayers and 
services of which were in use from the first ages of Chris- 
tianity." " The Liturgy," he says again, " is almost univer- 
sally esteemed by the devout and pious of every denomina- 
tion, and, next to the translation of the Scriptures into the 
English language, is the greatest effort of the Reformation. 
As a form of devotion, it has no equal in any part of the Uni- 
versal Church of God. Next to the Bible, it is the Booh of 
my understanding and my heart" 

Robert Hall, the brightest light that ever shone among the 
Baptists, and one that would have been bright in any firma- 
ment, confesses, that " the evangelical purity of its sentiments, 
the chastened fervor of its devotions, and the majestic simpli- 
city of its language, have combined to place it in the very first 
rank of uninspired compositions." 

The heavenly -minded Baxter, another non-conformist, 
whose writings have prepared hundreds for that " saint's 
everlasting rest " which gave title to one of his choice produc- 
tions, says, " The constant disuse of forms is apt to breed 
giddiness in religion, and to make men hypocrites, who shall 
delude themselves with conceits that they delight in God, 
when it is but in those novelties and varieties of expression 
that they are delighted; and therefore I advise forms, to fix 
Christians, and to make them sound." As Mr. Wesley for 
the Methodists, so Baxter prepared a Liturgy for the Non- 
conformists ; and, like Wesley, he sought the consolations of 
the Church's Liturgy in the hour of death. And Watson, a 
Methodist divine, as great as either of these, said, just as his 
soul took wing for Paradise, " Read the Te Deum ; it seems 



108 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



to unite one, in spirit, with the whole Catholic Church on 
earth and in heaven." 

Let these suffice, after the addition of one testimony more. 
The Princeton Review, in a notice of Mr. Barnes' "Position 
of the Evangelical Party in the Episcopal Church," — a work 
written, I am informed, after some members of his congrega- 
tion had gone over to that Church, as the eulogium above 
quoted was written some months before, holds the following 
language : — " It is well for the Church of England that she 
has a Liturgy, which brings out so clearly the doctrines of 
depravity, atonement, justification, Divine influence, and a fu- 
ture Judgment. What would have become of these doctrines in 
the lips of worldly Ministers, &c. ? Facts," it goes on to say, 
" are against this favorite position of Mr. Barnes, (viz., that 
the observance of forms is incompatible with the preservation 
of evangelical piety.") And, after reminding Mr. Barnes that 
God was himself the author of the forms in the Jewish 
Church, the Reviewer adds — " But to say, that a form of 
prayer, merely as a form, however evangelical, is destructive 
of piety, is to assert that the Gospel is not the Gospel, if it be 
read instead of being spoken." " Not that we object," said 
the Princeton Review of the year preceding, " to devotional 
composition, when happily exerted and wisely employed; on 
the contrary, we would wish that it were more common than 
it is." 

With this amount of testimony, which could easily be mul- 
tiplied into a volume, I am asked the question, Why is the 
Liturgy of the Episcopal Church so little esteemed, out of its 
own pale ? I answer, simply because it is not known. The 
Wesleyans of England know it, and, to this day, they use it, 
at least once every Sunday of their lives. Other Dissenters 
there know it, and they use it in many of their chapels at this 
hour. It requires one, two, perhaps three generations to be- 
come insensible to the fascinations of a Liturgy. Calvin left 



LITURGIES. 



109 



for his disciples a Liturgy. Luther composed for his follow- 
ers a Liturgy. Knox prepared a Liturgy for the people of 
Scotland. Baxter compiled a Liturgy for the Nonconform* 
ists. Wesley enjoined a Liturgy upon his followers. Twice, 
in the Scottish Kirk, did the Presbyterians adopt a Liturgy. 
Nothing but time and habit, or violent convulsion, can tear a 
Christian from his Liturgy. The separation once effected, a 
Prayer-Book becomes, to a Presbyterian, what the Bible is to 
the Papist — an unknown book ; uncared for, unadmired, unread. 
Such was the Prayer-Book to me ; and I probably regarded 
it with much the same aversion or indifference that the Ro- 
manist entertains towards the Bible, and for very nearly the 
same reason. Let the Bible be thrown into the way of the 
Romanist, as the Prayer-Book came into mine, and if he do 
not learn to admire, and venerate, and love and cherish it as 
I did the Prayer-Book, it will not be owing to any want in 
the sacred volume, either of intellectual sublimity or of moral 
loveliness. There must be, in ordinary circumstances, not 
only a taste, but an educated and cultivated taste, to appre- 
ciate beauty in a landscape, grace in a statue, refinement in 
manners, elegance in literature, force in eloquence, melody in 
music, purity in morals, and, to come to the point in hand, 
perfection in worship. Time, or opportunity at least, must be 
allowed, to correct and adapt the taste. It is impossible to 
rise, at a bound, from the impression that the sermon is the 
summum bonum for which we turn our feet towards the sanc- 
tuary, into the feeling — not new, I apprehend, to the heart of 
the veriest worldling among the Episcopalians — that, when 
we go within thy gates, O Zion, it is to worship God. It is 
not possible, from the heavy, dull common-places of an ex- 
temporaneous prayer, which it is enough to have heard once, 
to rise, by a single effort, to the dignity of a Liturgy, which, 
to be adequately admired, must be heard a thousand times. 
It is impossible to settle down, from the fitful, feverish and 

10 



110 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



momentary flights of the revival and the camp-ground, into 
the chastened and life-long fervor of the incomparable Liturgy. 
My own case may show. 

Owing to the distance of any other place of worship, I 
was sent, in my boyhood, once a fortnight, to the Episcopal 
Church. But I went without the necessary guide to my de- 
votions, and from a home, at which, among a thousand pious 
volumes, I do not recollect that I ever saw the Book of Com- 
mon Prayer. I did not therefore learn, in childhood, so much 
as to " find the places," or to take part in the responses, or 
even to perceive that sacred amusement, if I may so call it, 
by which the varied service, as I have often since remarked, 
engages so easily the attention of the child of the Church. 
For, while an extemporaneous prayer from a pulpit, often as 
elevated as the ceiling will well permit, fails, and must fail to 
give employment to the mind of a child, there is something in 
Liturgical worship, when properly performed, strikingly adapt- 
ed, as experience teaches, to occupy the mind and hands and 
lips, and, through all these, the heart of the little ones of 
Christ, and thus, to form, from the age of infancy, the great 
habit of devotion. We accept, therefore, most thankfully, the 
tribute sometimes paid to the Church, that her worship is well 
enough for the childish and illiterate. Like the Bible, it is a 
study for the learned, and yet giveth wisdom to the simple. 
Its language is, in part, literally the language of angels, and 
is yet within the comprehension of infants. It is a sun that 
will blind the gaze of the philosopher, but yet giveth light to 
the greatest and the least in the kingdom of heaven. It as an 
atmosphere, full of wonders to the spiritual chemist, but feed- 
ing alike the life of the wise and of the unwise. Its alle- 
luiahs are the alleluiahs of the Cherubim and Seraphim ; its 
hosannas, the hosannas in which babes and sucklings perfect 
and echo back the praise. We think, with Robert Hall, that 
its simplicity is its majesty. All this we should not dare to 



LITURGIES. 



ill 



say of a mere human composition. But the Prayer-Book is 
not a human composition ; nineteen-twentieths of its language 
are taken, line by line, and word for word, from that volume 
which has the mysterious power to chain the understanding 
of a patriarch, and to charm the heart of a child. A Gabriel 
may desire to look into its pages ; a Timothy may lisp them 
at his mother's knee. 

For the want of teaching in childhood, I was in after-life, 
entirely at a loss when to stand, or when to sit, or when to 
kneel, or where to " find the places." The same is the 
general complaint of Presbyterians, and is the reason, in most 
cases, why they find the service not only unedifying, but em* 
barrassing and painful, and why they leave the sanctuary 
with a growing prejudice against our Liturgy. Being myself 
seldom able to catch the responses of the people, as they 
were so often mouthed and mumbled, I had half the time un- 
finished sentences to dwell upon, more likely to distract atten- 
tion, than to fix devotion. And as the Presbyterian goes to 
an Episcopal Church from the same motive with which he 
frequents his own, not so much to be heard in the outpour* 
ings of his own heart, as to hear the declamation of the 
preacher — of course, the whole service before the sermon is 
unedifying and irksome. I was myself nearly thirty years of 
age before I could find the Psalms for the day, or the Epis- 
tles and Gospel, or could lay my finger on the Te Deum, the 
Gloria in Excelsis, or the Litany. 

Notwithstanding that I heard the Episcopal service under 
these disadvantages, I could not but notice, that the oftener I 
frequented it, the more it gained upon my heart. I could see 
nothing irreverent, to offend the eye. I could hear nothing, 
beneath the dignity of worship, to offend the ear. I heard 
large portions of Scripture, and the low concert of many 
voices, indicating that they were concerned in what was go- 
ing on, and that they felt they had an individual part and 



112 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



right in the exalted service — that it was not sectarian elo- 
quence which they had come as dumb Christians to hear, nor 
a mass house pageant which they had come as speechless 
spectators to see. 

As a Presbyterian, I felt certainly a little flattered by a 
tradition — I cannot now remember where I met with it — that, 
at the Reformation, the Presbyterians occupied so entirely 
every square inch with their serried hosts, that there was, in 
fact, not room to kneel, and that thence had arisen the cus- 
tom of standing in prayer. But now that our ranks were not 
so crowded, I fell back into the instinctive feeling, that a sin- 
ner's place, before the Maker of the universe, is on his knees. 

If kneeling be an aid to devotion in the closet, why may 
not its aid be permitted in the sanctuary ? If kneeling be 
proper in our families, why is it not desirable where meet the 
visible and invisible of the one family in earth and heaven ? 
If kneeling be thought indicative of life in the social'meeting, 
why should it be abolished in the great congregation ? The 
Saviour of the world lay low on the chill earth in prayer ; 
why should I not bend the knee upon the cushioned floor? 
Such an one as Paul knelt on the bare ground at the water- 
side ; why should not such an one as I kneel down within the 
warm and pleasant sanctuary ? Even Solomon in his glory 
" arose from before the altar of the Lord, from kneeling on 
his knees f why should not I with all my miseries fall down 
as low as he ? 

I have seen this instinct frequently betray itself in a Pres- 
byterian congregation. In time of a revival, when there is 
indication certainly of deep impressions of the Divine pres- 
ence ; when the creature sinks into nothingness before Him ; 
I have seen (and the same has been seen in a thousand pla- 
ces) the preacher kneeling in the pulpit ; the suppliant kneel- 
ing in the pew ; the " anxious seat " thronged with kneeling 
companies in presence of a kneeling minister; crowded 



LITURGIES. 



113 



prayer-meetings morning and night, where all could find 
" room to kneel ; " and the most palpable proof, in vast as- 
semblies prostrate on the floor, that kneeling or prostration is 
the posture indicated by the earnest mind in the presence of 
its God. Heathens, Mohamedans, Papists, Jews, all stand 
around Him while they praise, and fall down before Him 
while they pray. Presbyterians — and they alone in earth or 
heaven — sit down to praise, sit down to pray! Long will 
they search in the Scriptures for a license to this strange 
familiarity, and — let me say the word — this positive indecency. 
They will there find, perhaps, some standing, many they will 
find kneeling, others they will find prostrate in the dust, but 
none will they find sitting. And so indissolubly is the true 
idea of worship associated with prostration, that Presbyterian 
poetry swells above Presbyterian usage, — - 
" Satan trembles when he sees, 
The weakest saint upon his knees" 

St. John has lifted the veil from the upper sanctuary and 
shows us four and twenty elders falling down before Him, 
and the universe of angels casting their wings into the dust 
and falling on their face around Him, as they present the 
vials with the prayer of the saints, or else fill the high vault 
above them with the song that is always new. How amazing 
the descent from such a scene into the midst of a company of 
mortals, separated at a distance measureless and well-nigh 
returnless from the favor and patience of God, against whom 
heaven's gates were once hopelessly shut ; who are suspended 
by a hair over everlasting burnings, and who see the Son of 
God himself upon his knees in awful vigils for their safety, 
yet cooly sitting down when they praise, sitting or lolling on 
their seats when they pray ! I have a thought — an eloqaar, 
an sileam — let me say, I mean by it no uncharitable judgment 
of my fellow-creatures, I infer it mainly from the sectarian 
principle on my own mind — it is this : that the system is inca- 

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114 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



pable of producing a degree of reverence which may properly 
be said to amount to worship. The whole theory of free- 
thinking reducing everlasting and boundless truths within the 
span of human reason, and in its extreme results refusing to 
acknowledge the Infinite because He is infinite, the unsearch- 
able, because He is unsearchable. God because He is God — 
the whole theory, and the silent influences of the system are 
injurious, and in the end fatal to all reverence, and make the 
awful worship, which the Church Catholic has ever retained, 
a simple impossibility. That worship based on conceptions of 
the Divine nature, now almost lost among sectarians, is to be 
reached only from some different starting point. I feel certain 
that under the influences of that system, I never could have 
risen to that awe with which I am now taught to fall before 
Him, and from which, as from some "scale whose lowest 
round is planted on the skies," I behold an immeasurable 
expanse between the creature and Creator, which is but the 
opening of another and another, and yet another, which lie 
in interminable series between the frail child of dust and Him 
from whose hand he came. It may be doubted whether God, 
as conceived of under a sectarian, free-thinking system, and 
so irreverently regarded and approached, be not a creation 
rather than the Creator of the creature. God has been 
known many an age to the Church ; yet late in the nineteenth 
century, as if the world still slept, we see a writer in the col- 
umns of the New- York Observer introducing an argument (!) 
advocating the propriety of kneeling before Him, with this 
extraordinary language : " The question as to the proper and 
appropriate posture to be assumed in the solemn duty of 
prayer, is one that has begun to awaken the attention of the 
Christian public." 

For many years, while yet a Presbyterian, I often attended 
Episcopal worship on the week day festivals, and often even 
on the Sunday have I gone " by night," when the labors of 



LITURGIES. 



115 



a weary day were over ; and it was with me, as it has been 
with many, that the oftener I went, the often er I was com- 
pelled to go, where "honor and majesty were before Him, 
and strength and beauty were in His sanctuary." As yet I 
had not the remotest expectation of ever being numbered 
among " the children of the elect lady." Only I envied the 
sparrow her house, and the swallow her nest, and although I 
might not stay there myself, I did lay my young at thine 
altars, O Lord, my King, and my God ! But back to the 
miserable, empty, off-hand worship of my sect, like St. Paul 
to the body, I was obliged to go, less fitted to endure its husks 
and its inanity than I was before. Say, is it possible for the 
most gifted mind extempore, in the presence of a promiscuous 
assembly to hit upon thought and language adequate to all 
the high purposes of worship ? If I ask the question, it is 
because all my recollections would compel me to doubt. 

As I know that, in better days in the Presbyterian Church 
of Scotland, two books of public prayer were at different 
times set forth, so I have observed that in the heart of that 
Church, there is at this moment, a throbbing for their re- 
adoption. I know it from their own lips, that many of the 
Presbyterian clergy in this country admit, feel and, among 
themselves, deplore the vacuum which the loss of a Liturgy 
has left, and would gladly restore a written form, if the down- 
ward tendencies of the system and of the times allowed ; a 
form not, indeed, to be invariably binding, this were incom- 
patible with their ideas of liberty and gifts and inspiration ; but 
to be of discretionary use, and of occasional obligation. But 
as experience has shown that the very reading of the Scrip- 
tures, when left to the discretion of the minister, has fallen 
into sad neglect, as has been proven by history, that Litur- 
gies, when entrusted to the same discretion, fall into disuse, 
and even into oblivion. But having heard these unavailing 
regrets for the lost forms of worship, from some of the most 



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distinguished of my former brethren, and having heard the 
like sentiments falling, even at Princeton, from " those that 
sit in Moses' seat," it is not strange that gradually the suspi- 
cion grew upon me, that, in this respect, also, namely, the 
great ends and uses of all religious worship, Episcopacy had 
a most enviable advantage. I was, too often for my peace ; 
and comfort, disquieted and grieved by the so called devo- 
tions to which I was compelled to listen ; their irreverent 
familiarity ; their cold and wordy emptiness ; their forced 
ejaculations; their sluggish drawl; the thousand blemishes, 
defects, redundancies, extravagancies of their off-hand hom- 
age with which we were taught to approach a Being in 
whose sight the heavens are dark, and the angels chargeable 
with folly. 

But it is now so long since I was conversant with the evils 
which it is desirable to forget, that I shall refresh my memory 
by a method that will exempt me from all suspicion of draw- 
ing on my own imagination. The Boston Recorder has long 
been the organ of orthodoxy, in a community of great intel- 
lectual and moral elevation, and may be supposed to be quite 
competent, from its ample furniture of facts and from its own 
cultivated tastes, to express a judgment in the premises. The 
editor, whose language I shall not materially alter, but shall 
be obliged in some cases to abridge, puts forth the following 
as " some of the faults of public prayers." He does not 
notice, it will be observed, the blemishes of social worship, 
where the brethren indiscriminately try their "gifts." His 
remarks have exclusive reference to the classic ground ana 
higher dignities of the pulpit and an educated ministry. 
" Some of the faults of public prayers are the following : 
1. Doctrinal prayers, or prayers designed to inculcate cer- 
tain doctrines, which are regarded by the speaker as essen- 
tial or important. Should a prayer be thus converted into a 
sermon ? 



LITURGIES. 



117 



2. Historical prayers, in which are comprised long narra- 
tives for the information of persons not acquainted with the 
detail of the facts referred to. But is narrative the business 
of prayer ? 

3. Hortatory prayers, intended to stir up the zeal of the 
congregation, in regard to some particular subject or enter- 
prise, which at the moment may be thought interesting. 

4. Denunciatory prayers, designed to warn the audience 
against certain errors or practices, to put down certain senti- 
ments, or to awaken towards them indignant feelings, being 
appeals to men, not addresses to God/' Fire from heaven is 
constantly invoked ; temperance, abolition, revivals, missions, 
anything will furnish fuel for the passion ; and the lash of a 
' local public opinion/ manufactured, perhaps, in some misera- 
ble village, is mercilessly applied to some penitent individual 
or class of individuals in prayer. Innumerable instances tread 
one upon another in my memory ; but it is needless to recite 
them. Now let the variances, emulations, and strifes, of Epis- 
copalians, be what they may, we keep them out of our devo- 
tions ; hence, when sectarians look on, expecting to see us 
the next moment separate in schism, ' we have an altar ' 
where strife cannot come ; we forget our differences at the 
throne of grace and prayer ; ' with one mouth ' still keeps us 
one. 

" 5. Personal prayer, which springs from a desire to ad- 
minister a secret rebuke, or to bestow commendation, some 
individual being expressly in the mind of the person praying." 
How often have I heard the praises of a dead minister or 
deacon follow him, like the chanting of a requiem, from the 
pulpit, proclaiming to the Almighty the dead man's title to 
canonization. How often have I heard a visiting clergyman 
eloquent in eulogiums upon the blushing or unblushing pastor 
of a congregation, whose virtues and usefulness were repre- 
sented to the Lord as reasons why his invaluable life or health 



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should be prolonged ! How often have I heard the pastor 
himself enumerate the merits of some elder or wealthy and 
generous individual now dangerously ill; and how often have 
I imagined that the enumeration of the good qualites of some 
dying woman fell upon her ears like the anointing of oil, and 
actually raised her up, or, if it failed in this result, had all the 
virtue of an " extreme unction " to soothe the pains of her 
departure. Contrasted with all this, how grave, and digni- 
fied, unexceptionable, and sufficient, are the varied prayers of 
the Episcopal Liturgy for the sick, and the impressive service 
by which the dead are committed to the dust; for so the 
greatest tragedian of this age, when asked what was the no- 
blest composition in the English language, is said to have 
replied, " the burial service of the Church of England" But 
let our Reviewer proceed. 

" 6. Eloquent prayers, in which there is a display of a bril- 
liant fancy and of polished and elegant language, compelling 
the hearer to say, ' what a fine prayer that was.' " 

" 7. Familiar prayers, in which there is an evident absence 
of that sacred awe and reverence which should fill the mind 
in every approach to God." This is a miserable canker, but, 
strange to say, has been often interpreted as a note of high 
spirituality, entitling the individual as the phrase is, to " draw 
very near/' " What liberty," said the man-worshipping elder, 
" our pastor had in praying this morning." " Why yes," 
replied the Churchman, "I must say I think he took very 
great liberties." 

" 8. Sectarian prayers, indicating very clearly an attach- 
ment to a particular sect among the multitude of Christian 
denominations." In contrast with this feature of public 
prayer, which is capable of being made singularly offensive, 
how chaste is the spirit of the Church's Liturgy, which 
although it " might have whereof to glory," yet vaunteth not 
itself, but remembereth only in her prayers "the holy Church 



LITURGIES. 



119 



throughout all the earth," and " all that profess and call them- 
selves Christians," and requireth of her priests to bear all the 
tribes of Zion on their hearts before the Lord, as the Jewish 
high priest bore upon his breast the names, in precious stones, 
of the twelve tribes of Israel. 

" 9. Long prayers, which weary and exhaust the ' spirit 
of devotion.' " Whitefield is remembered to have said, 
" Brother, you prayed me into a good flame, and you prayed 
me out of it again." And we know how quaint has become 
the appellation, of " the long prayer," or the prayer before 
the sermon, in some portions of the country. The Episcopal 
Liturgy is not, to one engaged in its worship, liable to this 
objection, although to a dumb spectator it may be irksome. 
There is an animation and variety about it ; and there are 
intervals and rests provided, which entirely preclude the 
fatigue incident to a long and continuous prayer. 

Here endeth the editorial lesson. Ah me ! if these are but 
" some of the faults," and such faults as these must be endured 
in bright New England, and in her classic capital, and from 
an educated and accomplished ministry, what must be the 
insufferable corruptions of public worship and of the very 
idea of Divine worship among the illiterate and extravagant 
sects that swarm over the land. 

As the catalogue raisonnee of the Boston Recorder is pro- 
fessedly incomplete, we will take leave to continue it. 

10. Self-laudatory prayers, heard chiefly from the agents 
of societies, which enter regularly into the work of reciting 
the merits of a particular society, or the self-denying labors 
of some devoted band of Sunday-school teachers, or Tract- 
visitors, or Scripture-readers, or the noble sacrifices about to 
be made by some embarking missionaries, or the wonderful 
successes of some particular branch of operations in which 
it is understood the speaker has borne a conspicuous part — 
quorum magna 'pars fui. 



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" And all, in turn, essay to paint 
The rival merits of their saint ; 

— For, be it known, 
That their saint's honor is their own." 

11. Un-English prayers, in which uncouthness of expres- 
sion, and carelessness of composition, offend the ear, and 
unfit the mind for worship. 

12. Short prayers, abridged and hurried, to make room for 
the sermon. 

13. Blundering prayers, in which the recalling of words, 
and the remodelling of half-finished sentences and embar- 
rassed pauses, constantly occur, so painful to the worshipper, 
and so fatal to devotion. 

14. Verbose or wordy prayers, remarkable for the quantity 
of words, and the paucity and meagreness of devotional 
ideas. 

15. Eccentric prayers, tainted with the sometimes intoler- 
able eccentricities of the individual who happens to make 
them. 

16. Unforgiving prayers ; for I have heard the remark 
from persons who have been half their lifetime attendants on 
extemporaneous worship, that they never heard, in a Calvin- 
istic congregation, a prayer for the forgiveness of then ene- 
mies. 

17. Defective prayers, which not only exclude some par- 
ticular petitions, but which omit some essential element of 
devotion, such as the confession of sin, the act of faith, the 
offering of thanks, the oblation of alms, the recognition of 
the Holy Trinity, even the mention of the name of Jesus. It 
is impossible, under the most urgent circumstances, that all 
the elements of proper worship, can be combined by an 
impromptu dash of the most gifted mind, hurrying on to the 
one great thing — the sermon. 

18. Common-place prayers, repeating, till they loose all 



LITURGIES. 121 



meaning, the same trite and tiresome thoughts in certain 
worn-out phrases and matter-of-course quotations ; that " we 
deserve to be made as miserable as we have made ourselves 
sinful;" that "others were as good by nature and better by 
practice than ourselves ;" that " sinners may be convicted and 
converted ;" that " multitudes may be heard inquiring the way 
to Zion, with their faces thitherward ;" that " Zion may 
lengthen her cords and strengthen her stakes ;" and that, 
finally, the Lord would "bless all for whom we are in duty 
bound to pray." 

19. Intellectual prayers, by which the speaker seldom fails 
to intimate that he is versed in all the metaphysical logo- 
machies and miserable subtleties of the hour. I recollect, 
that in presence of perhaps as large a Congregation as ever 
assembled in New York, a Presbyterian minister, in his 
prayer, first entered fully into the nature of the ability which 
he would not ask the Lord to grant the sinners then present, 
and which it was alleged they possessed sufficiently already ; 
and that he then defined, with logical precision, the exact 
thing which he had it in his own mind that the Lord should 
grant. 

20. Theatrical prayers, accompanied by painful gestures 
and grimaces, the latter resulting perhaps from the (unscrip- 
tural) custom of shutting the eyes, and of making at the 
same time a mental effort, under the unpleasant consciousness 
that the people are looking at the speaker. 

21. Bombastic prayers, which approach the Majesty of 
Heaven with a solemn grandiloquence, familiar only to an 
oriental court. 

22. Declamatory prayers, where the voice becomes excited 
to a fatiguing pitch, and often strung to a complete falsetto. 

23. Objurgatory prayers, in which the pastor imputes, in an 
offensive manner, before the Lord, the low condition of his 
parish, and the departure and absence of the Spirit, and the 

11 



122 



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cessation of conversions, to the- unbelief and other sins of 
the people. 

24. Inaccurate prayers — inaccurate in facts, quotations, 
reasonings, and the like. A prayer was once made in my 
own congregation, giving the intelligence, that, " Thou hast 
taught us in thy holy word, man wants but little here below, 
nor wants that little long/ 5 I have shown, in another place, 
that the ablest divine may make a mistake of years in 
acquainting the Almighty with the age of a young clergy- 
man. 

25. Presumptuous prayers, petitioning for favors that it 
would be miraculous to grant, or thanking the Lord for the 
ascertained conversion of such and such, or for the undoubted 
translation of some deceased individual into His presence in 
Heaven, or for mercies that imply the prying into " those 
things that are not convenient." 

26. Political prayers, that, even if they do not give offence 
to a party, yet are certain to put the politician on the qui 
vive to discover the political opinions of the minister. 

A little reflection must make it obvious, that these evils are 
unavoidable, under the system by which they are generated. 
If a minister is to pray ex tempore — much more, if he is to 
pray ah imo pectore — unless he be endowed with rare dis- 
cretion, to distinguish the promptings of passion and private 
feeling from the movings of a better spirit, his prayers must 
inevitably take color from the objects and influences around 
him. In times of agitation and violence, he cannot touch 
them without being drawn unduly, albeit, imperceptibly, after 
them : in times of spiritual declension and dearth, his prayers 
will move in the same sluggish current : in times of fanati- 
cism and inflated zeal, his prayers must savor of the reigning 
extravagance: in times of heresy and of dangerous and 
doubtful disputations, his prayers will lie in the current of 
these subtleties and novelties, or else be painfully directed 



LITURGIES. 



123 



against them : in times of religious strife or of political convul- 
sion, his prayers will be still infected by the prevailing leaven 
of uncharitableness and party discord ; and party discord is 
never consummated, until it has become identified with " con- 
science/' and, in another cant phrase, has "been made a 
subject of prayer." It is not in human nature to escape this 
snare. I care not how dignified the pulpit, or how good the 
man, the prayer will be graduated, as a rising or falling ther- 
mometer, to the religious opinions and the religious fervor of 
the times. The great regulator is wanting — a standing 
liturgy — to bind the clergyman, and to protect the devotions 
of the people, to day, from the strange fire that a heated 
imagination would bring to the altar, and to-morrow, from 
the cold nothings which would be offered up upon it. The 
Presbyterian, accustomed to the flaying process of such 
sluggish, jejune, drowsy prayers, as may be heard at any 
time, but especially in a country parish, or on a summer's 
afternoon, can hardly conceive with what amazing force the 
contrast strikes an Episcopalian ear, educated to the true 
harmonies of devotion. It was Wordsworth or Coleridge, I 
believe, who remarked, that he never so felt the sublimity and 
sweetness of the Church's liturgy, as, on returning to his 
parish Church, from a sojourn in a country place in Scotland, 
where he had been doomed to listen one or two Sundays to 
the extemporaneous effusions of a Scottish minister. 

It is certainly worthy of remark, that not one of the more 
than twenty faults that have been enumerated, nor of as 
many more that might be named, can be alleged against the 
Episcopal Liturgy. Yet, within its compass, not a perfection 
of the Divine Being, but is becomingly adored ; not a doc- 
trine of the Divine Word, but is proclaimed upon the house- 
tops ; not a bounty of Divine Providence but is thankfully 
rehearsed; not a want of human nature but is affectingly 
spread out; not a relation in life, but has its turn to be con- 



124 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



sidered ; not a class or condition of society but is charitably 
remembered ; not a traveller in the wilderness, not a voyager 
upon the wave, not a widow in her grief, not an orphan on 
her knee, not an infant at the breast, not a prisoner or captive 
in his cell is forgotten ; all who are in any trouble, sorrow, 
need, sickness or other adversity, are cared for and prayed 
for ; the absent and the distant, with all the Church visible, 
are remembered ; the cherished dead and the Church invisible 
are not forgotten ; and angels, and archangels, and all the 
company of Heaven are recognized and are admitted to the 
worship. 

On entering the sanctuary, after doing silent reverence 
before the symbol of the Divine Presence, we hear, first of 
all, some sentences from God's holy Word, inviting us to 
prayer. The pastor then, not lifted high above us, but stand- 
ing as a sinner in our midst, exhorts us earnestly to join in 
the devotions. Then follows the deep-toned confession of 
our sins, with the consoling absolution of the penitent, which 
joyful message of forgiveness is immediately followed by the 
voices of all present uttering that sweet prayer of children 
taken back to favor, " Our Father who art in Heaven." Then 
follow the Lauds and praises of the people, not in the words 
of human rhymsters, but in the words that inspired the harp 
of David, and even in the manner in which, on the banks of 
the Red Sea, in the temple at a later day, and in the syna- 
gogue until this hour, the people and the priests, or the 
people alone, answered and still answer one another, "by 
course." Then follow the Psalms, in such portions, that those 
delightful compositions are gone entirely through, once a 
month. We then listen to a well- selected chapter from Moses 
and the Prophets, which is followed by the noble Te Deum, 
which has earned the admiration, and swelled the devotions 
of the Church for more than a thousand years, or the rich Be- 
nedicite- When this is done, we hear a lesson from the New 



LITURGIES. 



125 



Testament, corresponding in its drift, with the one chosen 
from the Old. We then repeat our simple faith, as the Apos- 
tle's Creed has transmitted it from the earliest ages. After 
which, we join in the prayers, thanksgivings, and litanies of 
the occasion. Then, after a psalm and special preparatory 
act of invocation, we listen next, upon our knees, to the Com- 
mandments, each of which we accompany with prayer for 
grace to " incline our hearts to keep this law." We then sit 
down and hear a part of some Epistle in which an inspired 
Apostle inculcates some of the precepts of the Christian life, 
and immediately afterward, in the attitude of servants stand- 
ing to hear their Lord, we stand (for the same reason that we 
bow at the name of Jesus,) and listen to a portion of the holy 
Gospel, in which the Saviour himself speaks personally, and 
is always prominent. The Gospel and Epistle both are cho- 
sen in harmony with the lessons from the Scriptures, and all 
have bearing generally on some high doctrine or important 
precept of revelation, made prominent by the arrangements 
of the Church for the particular day. " In all which," we ask, 
with the great Hooker, " what is there which the wit of man 
can improve ? " 

After such devotions, it is not to be wondered at, that the 
preacher does not lapse into " endless genealogies/' and " the 
oppositions of science, falsely so-called," or into Gnostic and 
Neologic vagaries, and the subtleties of intellectual learning, 
or into the contentions of conflicting schools, and the heretical 
and startling novelties of some last author he has read. Nor 
is it strange, that the laity, under such tuition, become familiar 
with the notes of the ancient faith, as they become inspired 
with the breathings of the ancient worship, and that, unlike 
the Athenian sects around them, " who spend their time in 
nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing," 
they are little swayed by the dogmas and " private interpre- 
tations of the preacher," and, in all matters of religion, look 

11* 



126 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



upon any thing "new" with distrust, and deprecate the fond 
conceit of "development" in Christianity, whether it hatch 
its wretched brood in New England or in Rome. They may 
not become exact theologians under the teachings of the an- 
cient creeds and Liturgies; but, with this milk from their 
mother's breasts, they imbibe a certain instinct to know food 
from poison, and quod novum, hoc non verum, which reduced 
to a simile of daily life, is simply this, that " no man, having 
drunk old wine, straightway desireth new ; for he saith, The 
old is better." 

With a growing feeling, which at that time I considered 
Catholic, although it was, in fact, the very opposite, I allowed 
myself, on several occasions, to receive, while yet a Presby- 
terian clergyman, the Lord's Supper in the Episcopal Church, 
both because I would not turn my back upon a table that the 
Lord had spread, and also because the form of its adminis- 
tration in that Church commended itself so entirely to my 
understanding and my heart. A Presbj'terian Communion, 
borrowing yet another unsightly feature from Congregation- 
alism, is now generally celebrated in the afternoon, when the 
flesh is full, the mind weary, the eye heavy, and the heart 
asleep. But, as it is now no longer a Sacrament, it can be 
thrust out of its place in the freshness of the morning, to 
make room for the preacher and his sermon! To this dull, 
drowsy service, dictated by a single mind, poorly qualified, at 
best, to raise me from the things of earth, and presenting to 
my longing lips a hard and chilling stone for warm, nutri- 
tious bread, I came, in the accidental way just mentioned, to 
prefer a celebration, more commensurate with the dignity, 
and more congenial with the sweetness of so august a Sacra- 
ment. The Episcopal Church forbids its depending upon one 
man, whether a whole congregation shall be edified or not, 
whether a glorious Sacrament shall be marred or not, whether 
the atonement shall ultimately be denied or not, and compels 



LITURGIES. 



127 



the minister to speak in " the words of sound doctrine," — the 
words by which the martyrs passed away to their reward, 
and sainted millions in the ages gone by, grew so eminently 
ripe for Heaven. 

The Communion office of the Episcopal Church is the 
resplendant gem in the girdle of devotions with which she 
belts the days of her holy year, and the hours of her holy 
days. In the immediate presence of her Master, showing His 
hands and His feet, she rises above herself, in the magnitude 
of her conceptions, and the fervor of her strains. No 
" thoughts " will suit her, but those that " breathe " in the 
bosoms of cherubim and seraphim ; no " words " will answer 
her, but such as " burn " with the martyrs as they pass 
through the fires to God. Therefore, " with angels and arch- 
angels, and with all the company of Heaven," she pours forth 
the stirring strains of the Tersanctus, and the boundless 
chorus of Gloria in Excelsis Deo. Perhaps the Presby- 
terian who knows less of the Prayer-Book than does the Pa- 
pist of the Bible, will be surprised to hear that these seraphic 
hymns, and other portions of our Eucharistic service, can be 
distinctly traced to the very days of the Apostles. Some 
hymns, some prayers the Apostles must have used ; it is not 
likely that the early Church lost them all ; the first Fathers 
of the Church tell us that these were some of them; at the 
same time they have a sublimity and sweetness that no human 
pen or voice can resemble. What then is the inference, but 
that ours is the Church, instinctively preserved, of the Holy 
Apostles, and of their glorious companions ? But the rapt 
spirit of the Communion service, the Presbyterian can never 
know ; because, to know it, he must enter into it, and taste 
and feel that it is his, as he falls down with an innumerable 
company, of every age, about the altar, — that great symbol 
of worship and of sacrifice. 

When I had nearly resolved on entering the Church, I was 



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conscious of a fear that I might become some day impatient, 
under the restraints imposed upon my " liberty/' forgetting 
that one very intention of a Liturgy is, to prevent men's 
taking liberties in the presence and the worship of their God. 
And, although my experience since, causes me to be aston- 
ished at such fears, finding, as I do, that I am not straitened 
in the Litnrgy — an ocean, so to speak, without a shore — but 
am only straitened in my own heart, and in the earth-bound 
ties that prevent my launching on its free and untrammelled 
bosom ; yet in those days I went so far as to inquire of Epis- 
copalians, and particularly of a clergyman, in whose candor I 
knew I might confide, whether they did not sometimes in their 
hearts covet a larger liberty. But Low Church differed not 
from High, nor the oldest from the youngest, in the universal 
answer, that the oftener they used their delightful forms, the 
more all other services appeared defective and unedifying. 
Such, I remember, was the testimony particularly of a vener- 
able and excellent clergyman, now fallen asleep, with whose 
friendship I was highly favored, and whom the " denomina- 
tions" around delighted to honor. 

Besides these assurances, I came to find, that I had had 
already an experience on this point, to which I had not been 
sufficiently attentive. I began to notice that prayers which I 
had learned in infancy, especially the prayer " Our Father" 
came, morning and evening to my mind, so that it cauld never 
be forgotten nor omitted. Also the little verse, which my 
mother taught me — 

" And now I lay me down to sleep," 

was observed to be the instinctive good-night with which I 
closed my eyes upon the world, and must continue so to be, 
until I shall have closed them on the world forever; and 
even in what is called extemporaneous prayer, I noticed, that 
my private devotions had all fallen into set stereotype expres- 



LITURGIES. 



129 



sions, and that only an extemporaneous effort, in its very na- 
ture injurious to devotion, would secure any tolerable variety 
in the pulpit itself. 

There was, too, another thing that struck my attention 
with considerable force. In those revivals, which, according 
to modern Presbyterian ideas, are the true thermometer of all 
that is kindling or spiritual in religion, when all remnants of 
forms are avowedly delivered to the winds, and a species of 
spiritual carnival or anarchy prevails, the effect of repetition is 
found to be what Episcopalians assert, and the very reverse 
of what Presbyterians at other times suppose. Not only is 
there, in time of a revival, a recognition of one of the great 
principles of Episcopal worship, in the increased proportion 
of praise and prayer, but the praises and the prayers, like the 
cries of Him in the garden, are constantly " in the same 
words." In those critical moments, when the interest is most 
intense, you do not find the minister announcing a psalm or 
a hymn never heard before, nor a judicious chorister selecting 
even a new tune, for the purpose of varying the effect, or of 
heightening the devotion ; but the hymn and the tune that 
were sung with such effect at the last meeting, must be sung 
again at this, and, though they have been repeated for weeks 
and months, yet no voice nor heart is weary. A new tune 
or hymn daily resorted to for variety, would kill a revival in 
one week ! And, for years, and throughout life, those same 
enlivening tunes and kindling hymns are echoed in the social 
meeting, and re-echoed at the fire-side, and in the darkest and 
coldest seasons are invoked, to warm and cheer by their lively 
associations, the Presbyterian, in his less happy " frames." 
How hallowed, then, thought I, by sacred associations with 
the past, and with all past ages, and how delightful, by a 
repetition that enables us to appreciate the force of words, 
and how sweet as the very language in which our dear de- 
parted ones, day after day, poured out their hearts to God, 



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and how adapted to recover a lost or deteriorated spirit of 
devotion, not to say, too, a lost or overshadowed faith, must 
be such a Liturgy as is found among the treasures of the Epis- 
copal Church. 

As a " revival," therefore by throwing the Presbyterian off 
his guard, and betraying the religious instincts of a pious 
mind, is a species of agitation, in which truth comes acci- 
dentally to the service, we appeal to it as an authority which 
certain minds can comprehend. And as a revival restores 
simplicity to the style of preaching, and is fatal to that meta- 
physical haranguing which degrades the pulpit to a level with 
the schools; and as a revival rouses the worshippers from 
their cushioned seats, and brings them to their knees ; and as 
a revival suggests also the public reception to the Communion, 
after a mode corresponding evidently to the rite of Confirma- 
tion ; and as a revival elicits, moreover, the earnest amen, and 
the audible response, from worshippers who feel that they have 
a right to join in, as well as hear the prayer, and, in fact, 
makes the privilege of prayer the privilege of all, so that even 
the women, who are commanded to keep silence, have their 
conventicles, where the full heart, denied its utterance in a 
Liturgy, may assert its liberty, and speak out its pent up emo- 
tions — so a revival does to Episcopacy a still further homage, 
by discovering the fact, that our most earnest and delightful 
devotions and " frames " are invariably identified with set 
psalms, and hymns, and forms, of which the ear, the lips and 
the heart grow weary never. Even the Princeton Review, 
cool, dignified, dispassionate as it is, acknowledges this prin- 
ciple in sound, even if it do not adopt it entirely in sense : 
" The lovers of old tunes will not be disappointed in finding 
such as Old Hundred, Wells, Saint Martin's, iWear, <fcc, — glo- 
rious old tunes, which our father's sang, and handed down to 
us ; time-honored, full of power, and deep religious influence, 
and which we are bound to use, and send down, unchanged 



LITURGIES. 



131 



and pure, to those that are to come after us." To me it is a 
perfect riddle, that the man who would thus gravely reason 
for mere sounds — vox et preterea nihil — should not feel the 
strength of his own argument, when dealing with such a 
Liturgy as the Episcopal. For we wish no better words than 
his, to express the same thought with reference to the Liturgy : 
" The lovers of old [hymns'] will not be disappointed in find- 
ing such as [the rich Benedicite, the noble Te Deum, the 
heavenly Tersanctus, and the thrilling Gloria in Excelsis 
Deo] glorious old [hymns,] which our fathers sang, and 
handed down to us ; time-honored, full of power and deep 
religious influence, and which we are bound to use, and send 
down, unchanged and pure, to those that are to come after 
us." We cannot see how the Princeton Reviewer has escaped 
the a fortiori in this matter. We are quite sure he must think 
well of Liturgies. The principle, whether it apply to devo- 
tion or to tune, cannot be disputed. Could Napoleon re- 
appear, to head his legions in the field, he would invoke the 
inspiration of the stirring Marseillaise ; and could the martyrs 
and virgins and confessors return, nay, should the King Him- 
self, in his beauty, come down, what strain more full of ma- 
jesty and sweetness could we find for all earth's voices to go 
forth and greet Him, than the heavenly Te Deum ? 

The revivalist finds all his machinery ineffectual, until he 
has drilled the congregation into set phrases and a fixed rou- 
tine of hymns and spiritual songs ; and nothing so electrifies 
a Missionary meeting, or achieves so successfully the difficult 
task of sustaining a high-wrought Missionary excitement on 
a great occasion, as the hymn of Bishop Heber — 

" From Greenland's icy mountains." 

Does the Presbyterian grow weary of the strain — 

" Salvation, 0, Salvation ! 
The joyful sound proclaim, 



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LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Till Earth's remotest nation 
Shall learn Messiah's name." 

Or does repetition lessen the thrill with which he sings 

"Waft, waft, ye winds, the story, 

And you, ye waters, roll, 
Till, like a sea of glory, 

It spreads from pole to pole ; 
Till, o'er our ransomed nature, 

The Lamb, for sinners slain, 
Redeemer, King, Creator, 

In bliss return to reign ! " 

It was, then, a mistake to have supposed that I had made 
no experiment in the principle of Liturgical repetitions. I 
found in myself, and observed in others, that the highest and 
happiest strains of devotion flowed always in the fixed chan* 
nels of precomposed hymns — written and familiar words. 
And the Presbyterian may rest assured, that what he has 
already found in the Missionary hymn, or in the revival cho- 
rus, such will he find in the anthems and prayers of a Liturgy 
kept bright by the use of ages. 

The worship of the ancient temple was Liturgical, and 
was made so at the express command of God. The worship 
of the synagogue was Liturgical, and Jesus took part in the 
same. The greatest prophet that was born of woman, pre- 
pared a form for his disciples. Jesus himself gave a brief form 
to his followers, as John the Baptist had done before him. 
We find the apostles and brethren, when at prayer, " lifting 
up their voice to God with one accord." St. Paul alludes to 
the familiar " amen " at Corinth, the " exhorting one another 
with the Psalms and tells us of irregularities and confusion 
created at first, by the popular participation in religious wor- 
ship. To this, and much more in the New Testament, I could 
only oppose the instructions of Paul to Timothy, that prayer 
should be made " for kings, and for all that are in authority 



LITURGIES. 



133 



" which does not look/' says Dr. Miller, " as if the prayers of 
the Church at Ephesus, were cut and dried ; " to which we 
might answer, that Timothy was now on his way to that 
Church to " cut and dry them," with instructions to include, 
among the subjects of prayer, " kings and all in authority," 
however vile or violent — a suggestion, we may add, carefully 
regarded in Liturgical worship, and too often unattended to 
in extemporaneous devotions. Even in heaven we hear the 
responsive worship — ten thousand times ten thousand voices, 
like the noise of many waters— the living creatures now upon 
their knees, and now standing before Him, the elders, the 
saints, and the angels, answering with voice and harp by turns, 
and proving, either that such, in St. John's day, was the 
Church's worship upon earth, which he transferred in a figure, 
to the heavenly choirs ; or that such is the gorgeous ceremo- 
nial of the heavenly sanctuary, which it is right and meet to 
imitate on earth. If the Princeton Review has found an argu- 
ment for the adoption of instruments in the music of the 
Church, "from repeated intimations of their use in celestial 
worship" let the argument be pressed, until it shall unseal 
the lips of the worshippers, as they are unsealed in heaven. 
How strange to see in heaven the bright throngs all silently 
seated, and a single saint, standing and praying or praising 
for the rest ! How strange to see a whole congregation upon 
earth all silently seated, and one man praying for the rest ! 
We do not see why the preacher should not relieve the people 
of the singing, as he relieves them of their praying. As we 
demand, therefore, of the Papist, to restore the cup to the laity, 
so we once more demand of the Presbyterian to restore the 
privilege of lay worship, which the preachers have usurped, 
and to give back to the people, with their ancient Baptism, 
their ancient responsive service. 

Is priestcraft a stealthy assumption, increase, and monopoly 
of rights and privileges ? Right stealthily has Calvinism with- 

12 



134 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



drawn Baptism from the infant; right stealthily (for Knox and 
Calvin allowed a Liturgy at first) has it usurped the prayers, 
and devotions of the laity. Here are two privileges, that 
Rome, in her haughtiest moods, never ventured to deny her 
laity. But, will say the Presbyterian, our laity do participate 
in the worship ; they have a whole volume of psalms and 
hymns, and are permitted to sing. Very well ; a printed form 
of psalms and hymns is, so far, a Liturgy, all full of prayers 
and praises, and is an argument for the use of forms. But 
let us hear once more the Princeton Review : — " It would 
seem as though the minister considered the interval of singing 
to be devised merely to give him an opportunity to attend to 
certain little matters of personal convenience. He starts the 
congregation upon a hymn, like an instrument wound up to 
go for a given time, and then proceeds to remove an extra 
wrapper from his neck, or to find the next hymn, or to arrange 
his notes and his collar, or, if it is the last tune, to undo his 
overshoes." Then follows the extraordinary intelligence, — 
" The singing is as much a part of the service of the house of 
God, as the prayer, or the sermon" 

It is quite true, as writers on this subject have said, that, 
strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Congregational 
extemporaneous prayers. A prayer may be extemporaneous 
to its composer, as it issues from a pastor's lips ; but the instant 
his petitions and words are adopted by the people, it becomes 
to them a dictated prayer or form. The Rev. Mr. Barnes 
himself makes weekly prayers for a thousand people ; the peo- 
ple have no choice, any more than have the Episcopalians 
whom he commiserates ; they must use Mr. Barnes's prayers, 
or else use none. The only question, then, for his parishion- 
ers to settle, is whether they will adore and pray in the off- 
hand words that Mr. Barnes teacheth, or will worship in a 
Liturgy that has gathered to itself, in one glorious focus, the 
wisdom and the piety of all ages, or, as the dissenting divines, 



LITURGIES. 



135 



already quoted have expressed it, which is, " next to the 
translation of the Bible into the English language, the great- 
est effort of the Reformation, holds the very first rank of un- 
inspired compositions, and has no equal in any part of the 
universal Church of God." 

I have not dwelt upon the Scriptural argument, because it 
is of the same nature with that by which we maintain the 
Baptism of infants, and the observance of the Lord's day. It 
is the argument of allusion — rightly understood, the most un- 
answerable of all others. The temple and the synagogue 
services were those in which both the Master and the disci- 
ples worshipped, and we know that those services were rigidly 
Liturgical. But we do not need the argument from Scrip- 
ture. The New Testament nowhere commands us to build 
Churches ; but, throwing ourselves on the authority of the 
Old, which did, we find it to edification to build them still. 
So the New Testament may not command us to use Litur- 
gies ; but, falling back on the authority of the Old, which did, 
we find it unto edification to use them still. The New Tes- 
tament could not prescribe a form for the Church, in all the 
varieties of place and condition under which the Church must 
exist ; it could only settle a principle ; and the example of 
both the master and the household established the great prin- 
ciple of Liturgical worship. Accordingly, we travel through 
the earth, and, wherever we find the Christian name, even 
among the Christians discovered by Buchanan, in the remotest 
East, and circled, since apostolic times, by the night of hea- 
thenism, we find the Liturgy ; the Liturgy, be it remarked, 
always purer than the Church itself, and ever presenting the 
basis of a healthy reformation. We go back into antiquity, 
and find the fathers alluding continually to this feature of 
divine worship, and telling us of nearly fifty different Litur- 
gies in use, in the different Churches throughout the world ; 
in fact, they have left no record of a single Church in which 



136 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



public extemporaneous prayer was customary ; they even tell 
us of Liturgies ascribed to the apostles ; and fathers that lived 
within a hundred years of the apostles, speak familiarly of the 
Liturgy, for example, of St. James at Jerusalem, and others, 
of that of St. Mark, at Alexandria. And, throughout the 
world, there was, and there is, so striking a resemblance of 
phraseology, and especially of the leading points and their 
arrangement and relative position in these Liturgies, that they 
lead us necessarily to suppose some common origin of high 
and primitive authority. And it is to this authority, that we 
trace the loftiest strains of the present Episcopal Liturgy. 
Our " Therefore, with angels and archangels, and with all the 
company of heaven," we find in all the Churches of antiquity, 
however widely separated, both east and west; and it had 
become known even in Africa to Tertullian, within seventy 
years of the apostles. So the Gloria in excelsis Deo, we trace 
to the very infancy of Christianity, substantially as our Church 
hath used it in England, twelve hundred years. And, in like 
manner, the creeds in our Prayer-Book, we can find in the 
writings of an Irenseus, who was taught byPolycarp, the 
friend of St. John, and of a Tertullian, in more distant Africa, 
who, within seventy years of the apostles, informs us, that 
they had been " the rule of faith in the Church from the begin- 
ning of the Gospel." No marvel that the Liturgy commands 
the admiration of the world. Wesley for the Methodists, and 
Baxter for the Nonconformists, both adopted it in part. A 
hundred years ago, the Lutherans of Denmark adopted it, 
although in a mutilated form. In 1712, Prussia and Hanover 
came very near adopting it, together with the Episcopacy, in 
the lifetime of Archbishop Sharp. Perhaps, if Satan had not 
then hindered the labors of some learned and excellent men 
on the continent, that dreadful moral night which now black- 
ens the face of Central Europe had not fallen upon Germany, 



LITURGIES.. 



137 



whence its deadly shadows are reflected over the greater por- 
tion of the Protestant world. 

Why should I say more ? I went to the Jewish synagogue ; 
the synagogue, on which the great, unreal argument for Pres- 
bytery is built ; and there I found the Jews, amidst their loss 
of country, home, and temple, still perpetuating the Liturgical 
and responsive worship, as it rang of old through " the carved 
work of the sanctuary." 

As to the objection, that it may become tiresome, the ob- 
jection comes always from those who have not tried it. The 
users of Liturgies do not complain. It therefore falls to the 
ground. To hear the daily Liturgy, is to hear the voice of a 
friend that has supported us in sorrow, and has counselled us 
in danger, and has guided us in perplexity, and has raised us 
up from sickness, and has commended our dying into the 
hands of the Redeemer, and has, with pious hand, dealt ten- 
derly with the dead, as it committed " earth to earth, ashes 
to ashes, dust to dust." To repeat it, is like repeating those 
endearing household words, of which the ear and the heart of 
true affection can never grow weary. We can no more grow 
weary of it, than we can grow weary of the air we breathe, 
or of the light we see, or of the bread we eat. The eye is 
diseased that grows weary of the light ; the appetite is morbid 
that nauseates the sameness of its breath, its water, and its 
bread. And the heart is not right, and the spiritual taste is 
depraved, that would loathe this spiritual manna. Give back, 
thou man of Rome, the cup to a thirsting flock ; give back, 
thou man of Geneva, the Liturgy to a congregation of dumb 
worshippers ! Let not the cup of blessing be drunk by proxy ; 
let not the great duty of worship by proxy be performed ! 

Again, What is the great business of the sanctuary ? Wor- 
ship. " My house shall be called the house of prayer for all 
people." How readeth the sectarian gloss ? " My house shall 
be called the house of preaching." In former years I often 

12* 



138 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



went to my Church under feelings indescribable, of oppression 
and grief, that the pulpit — the pulpit — was the great central 
object around which my congregation were assembling, and 
that, could I have asked them, one by one, " Friend, why 
comest thou in hither," probably without exception, the an- 
swer would have been, " To hear the sermon." O, I have 
longed, a thousand times, to come down from the lofty pulpit, 
and lie low among my fellow- sinners at the throne of grace. 
But, the sermon — the sermon — the sermon ; preach — preach 
— preach — was the everlasting cry. Even if our little ones 
could tell at night the text — the text — the text — it was enough. 
Is he a good preacher ? Are his sermons eloquent — rousing — 
interesting — intellectual ? Never was it asked on earth, in the 
selection of a pastor, are his prayers elevating ? are they edi- 
fying ? are they meet for the high purposes of worship ? No ! 
The preacher — the preacher — is the living-symbol, the Grand 
Lama of Presbyterianism, around which the people gather. 
In attempting, fruitlessly, in my humble sphere, to resist the 
overbearing tide, and to restore devotion and the Scriptures 
to their place in the worship of God, I encountered only the 
rebukes of my " most intelligent and pious " elders, not only 
for tempering my prayers with " the chaste fervor of the Epis- 
copal Liturgy," but even for closing at least one prayer on 
Sunday, with the prayer which the Lord has commanded us 
to " say ; " and this, although I conformed to the important 
order of Cromwell's High Parliament, in saying it at the end, 
rather than, as did the Church of England, at the beginning 
of my prayer. One of my elders happening to make this 
complaint to the late Doctor Milnor, the venerable divine 

replied, " Well, really, Mr. S., it seems to me, brother 

has very good authority for using that prayer." But Mr. S. 
had come from a land that is said, some years ago to have 
resembled heaven, chiefly in its color, and that in its palmier 
days, made it a statutable offence to eat mince pies at Christ- 



LITURGIES. 



139 



mas — to salute one's wife upon the Sabbath — to pray at a 
Christian man's funeral — or to say the Lord's prayer in 
meeting. 

I entered, now and then, an Episcopal Church ; nothing- 
shocked at the Low- Churchman's mitre, which there I might 
have seen — the symbol of her apostolic order ; nor at the 
High- Churchman's cross, which I sometimes saw — the sym- 
bol of her evangelical faith. If I entered with my hat on my 
head, or the world on my lips, the altar, the glorious altar, 
looked me reprovingly in the face, and said, " The place 
where thou standest is holy ground." The priest came in, in 
the white linen which the Lord commanded among a people 
whose salvation he had at heart, and, kneeling low among 
his flock, joined with them, and they with him, in the great 
business of the sanctuary. He then went into the pulpit — 
not, as I had elsewhere seen, to gaze around complacently 
upon an audience — but, remembering that he was dust him- 
self, to fall again, upon the ground beneath him, into the 
dust before God. A sermon, not elaborate nor ostentatious, 
but generally Scriptural and simple, ended, with prayer ; and 
the whole was followed by a reverential silence, and a pause 
for secret recollection and petition among the worshippers ; 
contrasting much with the hurried exit I had seen from a 
Presbyterian meeting, where overshoes, hats, canes, gloves, 
shawls, bonnets, overcoats, were adjusted, and the worship- 
pers, or rather, the "hearers," were equipped for the street, 
before the benediction had been pronounced. What ideas 
Presbyterians may have of the benediction, it is needless to 
inquire; but the confusion in the congregation, while the 
minister is pronouncing it, savors somewhat of the opus ojper- 
antis of a Popish priest, the benediction accomplishing its 
full mission, irrespectively of the faith or attention of the 
recipient. 

It must be evident to my readers, that the whole atmos- 



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LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



phere of sectarianism had now become to me uncongenial 
and unwholesome. To be losing my time and patience, and 
to be injuring my devotional taste and temper with the " gifts " 
of the brethren in a stupid prayer meeting, when I might be 
wafted toward heaven in the sublime strains of a holy Litur- 
gy ; to be frequenting a more public service, where prayer 
was curtailed, and holy Scripture almost excluded, and a few 
short verses of rhyme sung only as an interlude or rest, and 
all this done systematically, to make room for a labored ser- 
mon, often containing, unawares, in flowers of reasoning and 
rhetoric, the seeds of neology and infidelity ; to be advocating 
a Baptism that had lost its inward and spiritual part, and was 
limited severely in its application to a certain number; to be 
upholding a more awful Sacrament degenerated into an exter- 
nal and unessential rite, and administered in a mode, and 
received after a, manner comporting well with the new ideas 
of its virtue ; in short to be fruitlessly contending with con- 
tinual hindrances to my devotion and salvation, in the uncon- 
genial and unseemly things remarked in the foregoing chap- 
ters, and, as a minister to be perpetuating a system thus tried 
and found wanting ; when, by a single step, I might, (by pay- 
ing a price, it is true,) enter the larger liberty of a Church 
which breathes, and believes, and prays, and praises as she did 
when Irenseus, Ignatius and Polycarp beheld her glory, and 
the noble army of her martyrs died for her, as the pure 
spouse of Christ — all this had now become a burden too great 
for me to bear. 

Yet, if a Presbyterianism, such as my fancy had many a 
time imagined, could at this moment have been presented to 
my mind ; that should have made the Scriptures conspicuous, 
and worship the great business of the sanctuary ; that should 
have met the wants of a longing heart with a rich and noble, 
and wholesome Liturgy, all radiant with the gems of truth and 
holiness ; that should have placed the Sacraments under guard 



LITURGIES. 



141 



of an inviolable form, as being Christianity itself in epitome ; 
a Presbyterianism, in a word, with moderate attachment to 
old paths and landmarks ; my inquiries might here have ended, 
and I have continued in the traditions of my childhood. 
Again and again did the question recur, Why can we not 
have a Presbyterian Church after the model that so many wish 
for ? And again and again, did the disheartening answer fall 
like lead upon my ears — " These gifts are not for you." They 
are incompatible with the genius and destiny of the Presbyte- 
rian system. Its destiny is, always to lose — never to recover. 
Its genius is, never to believe, always to reason ! Certain ideas 
of religious " liberty," enough to make one tremble as he 
reads the predictions of St. Peter and St. Jude ; a new theory 
of religious " progress " and " development ;" a certain 
vanity of " private judgment ;" a preference of hebdomadal 
religion and spasmodic piety ; a singular opinion of spiritual 
" gifts ;" and a more singular fancy, that every man praying 
to be led by the Spirit, is actually so led, in his interpretations 
for himself — not only prevail coextensively with the system, 
but are so essential to its very texture, that they must be for- 
ever fatal, not merely to all endeavors to revive Liturgical 
and Scriptural worship, but, as we shall presently see, to all 
movements toward the recovery of the primitive faith. 



CHAPTER XI. 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



Having discovered the tendency of Presbyterianism to 
throw off, more and more, the decent garments, ritual and 
sacramental, in which the Reformation had so disguised it at 
first, as to secure for it, for a time, the respect, even of the 
Church of England, I had to pursue the facts in the case but 
a little further, to perceive that the system was quite incapa- 
ble of long preserving, or of perpetuating, unimpaired, the 
great principles of a Christian man's belief. There does ap- 
pear to be a something ever preying on the vitals of the sys- 
tem, producing everywhere the same phenomena — the fever- 
ish irritation, succeeded by the long and languid ague — the 
high excitement, and its consequent collapse — the spasmodic 
life, and the succeeding torpor : or, to drop this figure, it ever 
and anon gives birth to revivals and revolutions, to fresh 
schemes and schisms, to strange fancies and fanaticism, to 
new experiments, new sects, new theories, new doctrines; 
until the old landmarks which the fathers set up are swept 
away, the reign of intellectual anarchy sets in, and the devel- 
opments go on to infidelity — at first, in its more insidious 
phases — and, afterwards, in its stouter and more hideous forms. 

Departures from unity, I shall consider hereafter. I am to 
notice, now, departures from the faith. I shall be content to 
stand, for the present, bv those definitions of the faith, which 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



143 



the Wittemburg, Geneva, Westminster, Augsburg, Dort and 
Paris Presbyterians adopted at the Reformation. The propo- 
sition, then, is this : — That Presbyterianism is not conserva- 
tive of things spiritual, more than it is careful for things ritual ; 
and that, consequently, it could never have been intended to 
be the Lord's almoner of grace to men, or the steward of His 
mysteries to the household of faith. 

In theory, Presbyterianism promises much for the Church's 
purity. The cords are drawn tight. The tests are severe. 
The elect are numbered, The tares are separated from the 
wheat, before the harvest. The good fishes are severed from 
the bad, while the net is yet in the deep. The door is shut 
against the foolish virgins, before the bridegroom has come : 
even infants, in vast numbers, are frowned away from the 
healing of its waters, and the porches of Christ's Bethesda 
are converted into the dungeons of man's Bethhoron, the house 
of mercy into the house of judgment. There is an unceasing 
cutting off of unsound members, and of unsound bodies, and a 
still more distressing going off of sect after sect, with the 
view of setting up a sounder faith and a purer worship. 

With this rigor of discipline, was at first conjoined a 
severity of creeds, too well defined, one might have supposed, 
to be evaded ; too solemnly subscribed, one might have 
thought, to be, by and by, denied ; too evangelical, their abet- 
tors might have reasoned, to be ever undermined. Every 
avenue to error was foreseen and foreclosed. What then are 
we to think ? We find no fault with the system, on the score 
of consistency ; " elect angels," " elect infants" " persever- 
ance in grace," or the personal infallibility in doctrine, and 
indefectibility in grace, of each of the elect, and the " fore- 
ordination of all the non-elect to everlasting death," — so 
repeatedly avowed in the Presbyterian Confession — are a bold 
but manly and consistent carrying out of the great first error, 
the ngmov yjsvdog, lying behind the whole theory, that " God, 



144 



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from all eternity, hath, for his own glory, by the mere good 
pleasure of his will, fore-ordained whatsoever comes to pass." 
But it proves too much — more than the common sense of 
mankind, and the common sympathies of humanity, and the 
common and obvious first truths of Christianity, allow us for 
one moment to believe. Hence we set the system down, as 
the effort of a daring and gigantic spirit, seeking new ground, 
instead of falling back upon the old, whereon to raise a bar- 
rier against Popery. The terrific features of Calvanism, as 
they stand out from the canvass, under the fearless pencils of 
Zuinglius, and Peter Martyr, and Hopkins, and Emmons, that 
" God is alike the Creator of evil and of good, and is, by the 
same right, the author equally of sin and of holiness," are but 
the legitimate offspring of the Genevan stock. The " Geth- 
semane plan of salvation," recently advocated by divines in 
Philadelphia, computing the number of the elect with such 
commercial accuracy, that, if another soul had been intended 
to be saved, our adorable Lord would have been condemned 
to bear another pang, and to shed another drop of his most 
precious blood, is but another child of the same fruitful 
mother. So the reductio ad absurdwn, or, to speak our mind 
freely, the reduction to inevitable blasphemy, is fatal to the 
pretensions of the system. If it be true, that " God, from all 
eternity, hath, for his own glory, fore-ordained whatsoever 
comes to pass ;" if it be true, that, for Adam's sin, all man- 
kind are bom, " under God's wrath and curse, and are made 
liable to most grievous torments, in soul and body, without 
intermission, in hell fire, for ever," as the larger catechism 
teaches, (Ques. 27, 28, 29,) then is it reasonably tru6, as the 
same faith asserts, that certain infants are " elect," and it is 
truth to say, 

" I, by my dire decree, did seal 

His fixed, unalterable doom, 

Consigned his unborn soul to hell, 

And damn'd him from his mother's womb," 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



145 



Presbyterians, if this be so, do right to ascertain, if they can, 
the dividing line, and to restrict their Baptism to such infants 
as they may suppose to be ceremonially elect and clean. But 
these results indicate that the whole theory is human, and, 
notwithstanding the recent evasive distinction of decrees, into 
decrees of compulsion, and decrees of permission, or of prete- 
ntion — the decree of Evdoxrjaig, and that of Eydgeax^atg — the 
decree sublapsarian, and the decree supralapsarian — how un- 
like all this, is the cheering voice of the Apostles and the 
Church, recognizing, as God's elect, in a sense high and full 
of comfort and of hope, the favored communities and indi- 
viduals to whom His kingdom had come down, who had 
received the good word of God, and had been enriched 
with the illumination of his Baptism, raised, in a word, under 
the Gospel, to a new and bright probation, in which salvation 
is made, not only possible to all, but, to all who will, is made 
gloriously certain ; an election comparative, not absolute ; an 
election to means and not to their result ; to intermediate 
privileges and facilities, and not to abstract, and ultimate, and 
everlasting destinies ; an election always to good, never to 
evil ! 

These results, so repugnant to every feeling of humanity ; 
so incompatible with the boundless grace of the redemption 
that is in Christ Jesus; so utterly at variance with the true 
sovereignty of an independent and infinitely happy Being; 
representing to a world, already disaffected, its Happy Father 
as producing, by His own inexorable and predetermined will, 
the blight and mourning that it suffers, and yet, insultingly 
protesting, in His name, that He has " no pleasure in the sin- 
ner's death ;" these results, we say, so entirely unlike the 
weeping God who stood on Olivet, all bathed in grief over 
the destinies of wayward guilt ; so amazingly unlike Him in 
the garden and Him on the cross, and Him on high with the 
golden censor, and so unlike His Image, as faintly reflected 

13 



146 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



in the sympathies of Humanity itself, produce after a while, a 
reaction in the mind ; demonstrate to the heart the rottenness 
of the imposture ; and, at this point, too often leave the be- 
wildered man upon a sea of doubt and weariness, of scepti- 
cism and adventure. 

In this, the Presbyterian and the Papist agree: the one, 
denning Christ's gracious presence in the holy Eucharist, so 
as to violate our natural understanding ; the other, denning the 
divine sovereignty so, as to shock our moral constitution : the 
one contradicting our senses ; the other our sensibilities. And 
as, in throwing off Romanism, so in renouncing Presbyterian- 
ism, it is the natural tendency of the human mind to run, first, 
into religious anarchy, and, afterwards, by sure and measured 
strides, into downright infidelity. Hence the prevalence, at 
this moment, of infidelity and blasphemy in France and Italy 
and Spain ; and the infidelity, at the same moment, of Ger- 
many, and Denmark, and Geneva. Popery has done, in the 
one case, what Presbytery has done in the other. Side by 
side, is England, on the West, and the Greek Communion, on 
the East, and the Swedish religion on the North, under the 
influences of whose purer Episcopacy, and more or less pure 
traditions, infidelity expires. As the spell-bound Papist, 
awaking from his strange hallucination, and abjuring the wor- 
ship of the Virgin and her companions in glory, is tempted by 
the same effort to throw off the worship of her Son, Who was 
once a companion of their sufferings — so the Presbyterian, in 
casting to the winds the baseless fabric of a heartless system, 
rushes too often to the precipice, and takes the blind leap into 
a sea of irretrievable scepticism. 

" Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, 
bless his holy name," that He had planted on these shores a 
purer branch of His holy Church, with its sacramental signals 
waving high, inviting my sinking bark and failing heart into 
a quiet haven, at a moment when, in the liberty to which I 



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147 



knew not the proper check, I was tearing myself from a sys- 
tem uncongenial and unwholesome, and felt that the wide 
world was before me, and that all Churches, past, present, 
and to come, were equally at my election, and that none 
could say anathema, if, in the acknowledged right of private 
judgment, I should myself originate a " Church/' and call it 
after my own name, as others have so often done, that the 
blasphemy has now ceased to shock or even to surprise : or, 
if, in the large latitude conceded me, I should glide more 
modestly into the existing confederacy of Socinians, Arians, 
Pantheists, Neologists, Eclectics, Deists, Infidels or Atheists ! 

For myself, however, I did not, at first throw off the Pres- 
byterian creed, because I had discovered its defects or crudi- 
ties. True, both its crudities and cruelties have caused me 
many a bitter hour. Perhaps I continued to believe it, because 
it was unnatural, and might therefore be divine. But the 
change I have undergone, in respect of creed, has been rather 
by the silent and supplanting influences of a more Scriptural 
and wholesome, a more rational and consistent theology, of 
which I must say that I caught its spirit before I understood 
its terms. As nearly as I can now trace the change, the first 
hint of a higher and purer faith, I owe to the Westminster 
Confession, which has erected a fabric, partly divine and. 
partly human ; an image, partly of gold, and partly of clay — 
Desinii in piscem mulier formosa superne — and, in attempting 
to blend the old doctrine of the Sacraments with the new 
dogmas of a speculative era — earthly philosophy with celestial 
faith — has left a flaw, which reveals the weakness of the 
whole structure, and thus has fortunately suggested a starting- 
point, from which individual minds may begin to recover, as 
I was enabled to do myself, the ancient consistencies and 
beauties of a purer faith. 

But that which, more than all other considerations, loosened 
the hold of my former creed upon my confidence, was the 



148 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



historical fact, that it had been found, after long and fair ex- 
periment, in every possible variety of circumstance, insufficient, 
in any one instance, to protect and preserve inviolate the faith. 
And if the things I am about to allege, be true, I do solemnly 
appeal to my former brethren, to weigh well the matter, and 
to abjure a system, which all history has shown to lack that 
vital force with which every seed in Nature has been en- 
dowed by its Creator ; to propogate its like and to perpetuate 
itself. 

To cite the condition of the Scottish Kirk, might seem 
hardly in point ; as the eye of the Church of England is upon 
her ; and the leglislation of an Episcopal Parliament would 
not allow infidelity or heresy to supplant the faith of the old 
realm. But, notwithstanding these safeguards, how fares it 
with the Presbyterian Church in Scotland ? Her disruption 
into eight or ten Communions, all strictly Presbyterian, and 
all owing their origin to alleged unsoundness in each other's 
discipline and faith, shall be considered, when we come to 
speak of schism; and we allude to it here, only as indicating 
a general restlessness under the Westminster Confession, and 
a constant tendency to remodel its provisions. And what 
was the condition of the Kirk itself at the beginning of this 
century ? Who will deny, that under the workings of an 
Arian, Arminian, and Pelagian leaven, in different proportions, 
what is now regarded as distinctively the Evangelical doc- 
trine, was almost universally lost ? 

And what has been the fate of the Presbyterian Churches 
in England, where they have been sufficiently detached from 
the Scottish Kirk, to evade the legislation of an Episcopal 
Parliament ? Of two hundred and sixty parishes established * 
in their glory in the days of Cromwell, two hundred and forty 
are now Unitarian ! I was personally informed, a few years 
since, in London, by men who bewailed the fact, that up to a 
recent date, every Presbyterian Church and Chapel in the me- 



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149 



tropolis had lapsed into Socinianism, and that, so instinctive 
seemed the tendency to this result, that the new and orthodox 
congregations had, for their safety, been compelled to adopt 
certain principles of allegiance to the Kirk of Scotland. On 
this account, I found myself advised and obliged, everywhere 
in England, to drop the name of Presbyterian, or if I still bore 
it, uniformly to explain it. 

And what at the time we speak of, was the state of the 
denomination in Ireland, the last of the Three Kingdoms? 
Where it was not Unitarian, it was Arian, from centre to cir- 
cumference ; and that within a hundred years of the most 
wonderful " awakening " or " revival," that history has re- 
corded. In that revival, "multitudes swooned, and numbers 
were carried out as dead, and whole days together were spent 
in fasting, and preaching, and prayer. I have known them," 
says an eye-witness, " to come several miles to Communions, 
and after the Saturday's sermon, and to spend the whole Sat- 
urday night in company, in conference and prayer. They 
have then waited on the public ordinances the whole Sabbath, 
and spent the Sabbath night in the same way, and yet, at the 
Monday's sermon, were not troubled with sleepiness, and so 
they slept not, till they went home." Not long after this, as 
has been commonly the case, under the operation of like 
causes, opposition to creeds began to be made, and Pelagian- 
ism, Arianism, and Socinianism, and especially the views of 
Dr. Priestly, prevailed, and were current at the beginning of 
this century. I have stated these facts thus particularly, 
because the Presbyterian Church in the north of Ireland is the 
immediate mother of the denomination in America. It was 
from her, and not from the Kirk of Scotland, that several 
ministers came over, into Pennsylvania, Delaware and Mary- 
land, and organized themselves into the first American Pres- 
bytery. The mother has since played the harlot, and denied 
her Lord ; the daughter — but we shall speak of her afterward. 

13* 



150 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Let us first cross the channel that divides England from 
the Continent. The glorious Church of the Huguenots and 
the Vaudois — a Church planted in the learning and eloquence 
of Farel, and Viret, and Beza, and Du Moulin, and Calvin ; 
dignified by the arms of its Condes and Colignys ; fed by such 
pastors as Merlin, and Saurin, and Claude, and Daille, and 
Drelincourt ; fostered by nursing mothers, in a Margaret and 
a Catharine of Navarre — a Church, that, for its influence, 
was dreaded by the Mazarins, and, for its virtues, was re- 
spected by the Fenelons of France — a Church that bared so 
often its intrepid bosom to the dragoons of the bloody Louis, 
and the musketry of the perfidious Charles, and that could 
spare, for a wedding banquet, in a single night, a hundred 
thousand victims from her fold, and the head of her noble 
Coligny, to grace, at Rome, the festivities of an execrable 
jubilee — where is this Church, after which, for its virtues, and 
its prowess, the whole world wondered ? It is fallen ! It is 
fallen ! At Passy, and at Paris, at Rouen, and at Charenton, 
at Nismes, and at Lyons, it is fallen, like a millstone in the 
sea. It is a cage of unclean birds ; It is the hold of every 
foul spirit; it is the worst of anti-Christs ; it " denieth the 
Father and the Son" The little flock of Moravians, no per- 
secution has been able to diminish : the remnant on the moun- 
tains of Syria has survived the ravages of Islamism; but the 
Church of the Huguenots, only because it wanted the Apos- 
tolic descent, in which the Moravian and the Syrian are en- 
trenched, has not only lost her numbers, but has lost her faith. 
Of her six hundred Presbyterian clergy, I was informed, a few 
years since, upon the spot, that " there was not found ten " 
who dared to affirm that Jesus Christ was " God manifested 
in the flesh." Who can wonder that infidelity has " hastened 
to the prey," and that Popery has " divided the spoil ?" I am 
aware that, at this moment, there is a partial revival of ortho- 
dox opinions in that country; but I also know, that this 



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151 



revival, timid as it is, is not the spontaneous awakening of 
the Huguenot life, but is the effect of extraneous influences 
brought to bear upon that Church, not from Presbyterian 
Switzerland or Germany, but from Churchmen and Dissenters 
in Episcopal — Catholic England. Its character, too, is totally 
wanting in the manly features of the old Huguenot religion ; 
it is pale, sickly, emaciated, and emasculated, presenting, at 
best, the melancholy spectacle of a distracted community, 
with here and there a solitary individual, sighing over its cor- 
ruptions and its schisms. 

Passing over to Switzerland, let us go through her twenty- 
two republics, beginning at the home, the Church, the pulpit, 
the grave of Calvin. I saw in the heart of Geneva, a proud 
sepulchral monument to Rosseau ; but, to forgotten Calvin, 
" they raised not a stone, they carved not a line." The Con- 
fession of Faith continues, as it does in France, to be sub- 
scribed ; but it is no longer believed. The ashes of Servetus, 
to whose fiery death Calvin gave his voice, have been scat- 
tered over lake and hill, and have broken forth in blains and 
boils, upon the whole Presbyterian body ; while the opinions 
for which Servetus perished, are preached with trumpet- 
tongue, in the very cathedral from which Calvin hurled his 
anathemas against him. Of the whole venerable Synod of 
Geneva, but one solitary pastor, as I was informed when on 
the ground, was even suspected of believing in the divinity of 
Jesus. They began by denouncing it a superstition to bow 
at His name : they have ended by declaring it idolatry to bow 
to him at all. When, a few years ago, the venerable Malan 
dared to say, in his discourse, that Jesus " is the true God and 
eternal life," and that " there are Three that bear record in 
heaven," he was driven from his pulpit, and hooted on the 
streets, as profanely as if he had cast his pearls before a Mus- 
selman mob in Mecca or Beyrout. The same was the state 
of things in the other republics. In short, the old Church of 



152 LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Switzerland, the Church of Zuinglius and Bucer, of Farel and 
Beza, of Ecolampadius, and Calvin, has become openly So- 
cinian and infidel. Any child in Geneva could have guided 
me to the bright islet, where the statue of Rousseau looks 
proudly on the blue Rhone, as it gushes out at his feet from 
the lake, or to the house of Voltaire, which, from the French 
border, keeps sentinel over the city ; but I could find no one 
in Geneva capable of pointing out to me the spot in the 
churchyard where the ashes of Calvin repose. Even the 
handful of " Evangelical " Christians in the place, I found, in 
1838, divided, two against three, and three against two : the 
venerable Malan living in schism from his brethren, and 
Brownism, and Anabaptism creeping into the fold. Such has 
been the fate of Presbyterianism in the place where it was 
born, and drew its first breath. Protected in its birth by a 
frowning and gigantic creed, as the place where it was born 
was hemmed in by scowling and terrific mountains, still it 
has obeyed the law of its existence, has run through the circle 
of its destiny, and has ended in the denial of its Lord. 

In my younger days, I had been greatly prejudiced against 
Episcopacy, by the fact, that public functionaries under 
British law were formerly required to be Church Communi- 
cants. The Church of England, though so " little among the 
thousands of Israel," is so truly " a city on a hill," that all 
that happens in her is immediately noticed and known, it 
would appear, over the whole earth. Yet the same abuse 
existed wherever Presbytery was established, and existed 
within the memory of the living, in portions of New England 
itself. But I never heard of sacramental abuses so offensive 
as some that I have witnessed in Geneva. I happened, on 
one of the chief days of Communion, to be at the cathedral 
in which Calvin was the chief pastor in his lifetime. A large 
number of gentlemen and men stood in the streets about the 
Church, waiting until the sermon and preliminary services 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 153 



should end, that they might go in and receive the Sacrament. 
This, too, I was informed, was the common practice ! With 
the views which I held, even then, that the un worthiness of 
the minister or of the congregation could not invalidate a Sa- 
crament, and on the ground that the Creed yet remained as 
the Reformation had left it, and therefore that the Church 
was a Church of Christ, I remained in the cathedral, and, 
endeavoring to feel my own unworthiness, rather than that of 
the minister, I received the Communion without the smallest 
scruple. But here I may tell the world a secret. There was 
in our company that day, a Presbyterian clergyman, who 
thought, to use his own expression, that " the Church in Ge- 
neva had exceeded the limits within which a Church contin- 
ues to be a Church of Christ," and with a conscience, I doubt 
not, as clear as my own, in the opposite direction, he would 
not and did not commune. It remains only to be said, that 
the clergyman, who thus turned his back on the altar at which 
Calvin ministered, and who dealt thus with the Church of Ge- 
neva as "an anti-Christ" in 1838, was the same who, in the 
controversy of 1845, made the following ad captandum : 

" When Dr. Wainwright, a gentleman, a scholar, a Christian 
minister, (in each of which titles there seems to be implied the 
idea of refined feelings, as well as bland manners,) has taken 
so public, so extraordinary an occasion, for the purpose of 
un- Churching the whole of Protestant Christendom, the 
Churches of Germany, Switzerland, France, &c, it is 
surely high time to demand that the public should be put in 
possession of the evidence by which so bold and unflinching 
an assertion is to be sustained ; or, if that evidence is not 
forthcoming, it is equally high time that the enormity of the 
assumption should be exposed. There are hundreds who can 
perform the task better than myself, but still I believe it not a 
task which requires the strength of a giant." 

Well said! Now then, Doctor, to your "task." If the 



154 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



veriest Liliput is equal to it, I am sure that you are. You did 
not commune with the Church of Geneva, on the ground that 
it had u ceased to be a Church of Christ." I believe you did 
not, and would not, commune, and for the same reason, with 
the large Churches of Germany and France. It surely is 
high time to demand that the public should be put in posses- 
sion of the evidence by which so bold and offensive an edict 
of excommunication is to be sustained ; or, if that evidence is 
not forthcoming, it is equally high time that the enormity of 
the assumption should be exposed. Doctor Wainwright, in 
1845, did only what you had done before him, in 1838. He 
did it, on the ground of Catholic and established law ; but 
you have done it on the ground of private and independent 
judgment. He did it, with a thousand leagues of sea between ; 
you crossed the sea, and did it at the chief altars of Geneva. 
He charged them only with erecting another Church, which 
is not another ; you have charged them with preaching 
" another Gospel which is not another" "Whether of the two 
anathemas is most offensive ? Pray, put " the public " in pos- 
session of " the evidence ;" for, " if that evidence be not 
forthcoming, it is high time that the enormity of the offence 
should be exposed." But we will not wait. 

Leaving Switzerland, let me ask the reader to go with me 
down the Rhine, and see how fare our " separated brethren," 
in Germany. It is well-known that the Protestants of Ger- 
many, like those of France, Holland, Switzerland, and, in fact, 
of the entire continent, with the single exception of Sweden, 
are Presbyterians. Many of them, from motives of expe- 
diency, or convenience — and it is a concession of great 
importance to Episcopacy — have created a class or order of 
Ministers, at first called Superintendents, but dignified, latterly, 
with the Babylonish name of Bishops ; and, in this respect, 
resemble the Methodists of America, who have this spurious 
Episcopacy. But, in fact, the Protestants on the Continent, 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



155 



Sweden only excepted, are Presbyterian. And what has been 
the fate of the faith in Germany — the land of Jerome, and 
Huss, and Grotius and Melancthon — the land of Luther ? 
" I could not find," says a recent American and Presbyterian 
traveller, " a single individual in Germany who believed in 
the eternity of future punishments." Even the Evangelical 
and excellent Neander, given up to what is known in Ger- 
many as the theologia pectoris, or religion of the affections, 
thinks that "the doctrine of universal restitution does not 
stand in contradiction to the doctrine of eternal punishment 
as it appears in the Gospels ; for a secret decree of the divine 
compassion is not necessarily excluded, by virtue of which, 
through the wisdom of God, in the discipline of free agents, 
they may be led to a free appropriation of redemption." The 
father of the new philosophy of Germany has been deified as 
" Messiah the Second ;" and our awful Baptism, I was 
informed, had, by some of her clergy, been administered in 
the name of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or of Reason, Hu- 
manity, and Love of Country. It is taught by her pastors, 
that there is no other God than in the things we see, and that 
man himself is the highest impersonation of Divinity, and, in 
such a one as Christ, man may therefore be lawfully adored ! 
As to the Bible, it has been justly said, that " if Luther could 
return from the dead, he would find the Bible as much ban- 
ished from the communities professing his doctrine, as it was, 
in the worst times of the Papal policy." And if the Bible has 
begun to reappear in those lands at all, it has been in many 
an instance, if not in absolutely all, by the direct or indirect 
agency of British residents, or of a British and Foreign 
Society. 

Nor would this be so terrific a result of Presbytery, if the 
" Evangelical " clergy of Germany, of whom one here and 
there is to be found, gave hope of a brighter day. But Luther 
himself bequeathed to them the dangerous precedent of set- 



156 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH, 



ting Scripture itself aside, when it stood in the way of some 
favorite opinion. Epistolam Stramineam — An Epistle of 
Straw — he did not hesitate to style the Epistle of St. JameSj, 
because it laid the axe effectively at the root of his articulum 
ecclesicB stantis vel cadentis. Other books of the Bible fared 
with him but little better. The German Evangelical Clergy, 
still profiting by the courage of the master, are able, by a 
dash of the pen to settle, on the basis of " private judgment," 
the canon of Scripture which the whole Catholic Church was 
cautiously substantiating for three hundred years. " Scarcely 
a book of the New Testament," says a Presbyterian writer 
well acquainted with his subject, " has escaped the obeliscus 
of some Aristarchus ; and we know not that the Doctor's hat 
could be duly conferred, in Germany, on one who had not 
singled out some book for elimination. . . . There are in 
Germany scores of scholars whose tact enables them to pick 
out a Pauline epistle as confidently as a bank-cashier can detect 
a counterfeit note. . . . Several attribute the Apocalypse to 
a disciple of John. Eichhorn pronounces it a drama on the 
fall of Judaism and Paganism. . . . Semler condemns it as 
a work of a fanatic. Amnion thinks the author and the editor 
of John's Gospel to be different persons. Vogel, Rettig, Bal- 
lenstedt, and Bretschneider, deny its authenticity. Schlier- 
macher rejects First Timothy ; Eichhorn rejects all the Pas- 
toral Epistles. Schmidt throws doubt over both the Epistles 
to the Thessalonians. Cludius treats those of Peter in the 
same way. Baur and Schneckenburger consider Luke, in 
the Acts, not as giving a faithful narrative of events, but an 
apolegetic statement, to vindicate favorite opinions. Kern 
maintains that the Epistle of James was forged by a Jewish 
Christian, in the name of this Apostle, to controvert the Pau- 
line doctrinal views which prevailed in the Gentile Churches. 
Gfrorer finds undeniable marks of falsehood in the account 
given of Cornelius. And it is significant, that even the sounder 



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157 



German writers, when called upon to combat such views, 
rehearse them without any approach to a shudder. . . . Ne- 
ander himself regards the Epistle to the Hebrews as the work 
of a Christian, a learned and eloquent Alexandrian, who stood 
to Paul in the same relation as Melancthon to Luther. He 
denies the genuineness of the First Epistle to Timothy, and 
exceedingly doubts that of Jude, and entirely gives up the 
Second of Peter. As to the inspiration of the Scriptures 
generally, Neander holds it, both in degree and in kind, far 
below what is regarded as orthodox among ourselves." Such 
are the fancies of German divines and universities, to which 
the Stuarts, and Hodges, and Alexanders of Presbyterianism, 
and her seminaries in America, are sent to learn the Art of 
Exegesis. And these are the elaborated fancies of Neander, 
" A venerable theologian," according to the Princeton Review, 
from which I have just quoted, and am now quoting again, — 
" a venerable theologian and a noble scholar — perhaps the 
most celebrated Professor in Germany, and whose works we 
never open without instruction and delight." [ ! ] And such 
is the sea of doubt and wild conjecture, in which even the 
" Evangelical " remnant in Germany are driven. And, unless 
the Church be invoked as the true Witness, to say, what were 
the books of Scripture confided to her, from the beginning, 
who shall settle, either for the German Presbyterian or Amer- 
ican, the canon of Scripture, and give them again the Bible, 
of which Presbyterians in this country yet unthinkingly boast, 
as the rule of faith, but whose claims they are consistently 
enough beginning, like their more advanced brethren in Ger- 
many, to reinvestigate, in all the unbounded plenitude, and 
the jure divino of untrammelled " private judgment." 

Thus has Socinianism, with her pestilential train, trodden, 
with giant step, the causeways of Irish Presbyterianism ; 
planted her banners in the Presbyterian encampments along 
the Thames and the Seine ; written her insulting creed on the 

12 



158 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



tombs of the Yaudois and the Huguenots ; reared her tower- 
ing head above the Alps and the Appenines ; dashed on, like j 
the winter avalanche,, into the fair vallies of Switzerland ; and 
kept her insulting jubilee in the cathedral of Geneva, and over 
the dust of Calvin. Rolling with the turbid torrents of the 
Rhine, she has scattered its seeds of death into a congenial 
soil upon its right bank and its left; she has entered the 
seats of learning, and, by her resistless spell, has won over to 
herself the renowned universities of Germany. Leyden and 
Leipsic have fallen down before her. Wittemberg and Hei- 
delberg have kissed her feet : and Gottingen and Berlin have 
anointed them with ointment. In a word, the lawful child 
of Presbytery has succeeded to the Empire, wherever Presby- 
terianism had reigned before her. She would fain have 
crossed the stormy Baltic, and have planted her icy taberna- 
cle in the north, and, like the maelstrom on the coast of Nor- 
way, have swallowed, in her capacious throat, the Churches 
of those empires. It was not the stormy wave of the Baltic 
that arrested her progress ; for she had stridden a continent 
and an ocean before. It was not the hills of Dofrefield that 
turned her back, for she had conquered the Jura and the 
Alps. But, with the music of those waves, there were borne 
to her ears the strains of a Catholic Liturgy, and beautiful 
upon those mountains she beheld the feet of Apostolic 
Bishops. " It would be interesting," says a writer, on whose 
accuracy, I must, for the present, rely, " to compare the two 
kingdoms of Saxony and Sweden. Both are almost exclu- 
sively Lutheran ; the people of both are generally well edu- 
cated ; religion is one of the studies in every grade of the 
public schools of both. One is universally Rationalistic ; the 
other universally Orthodox. One has not more than half a 
dozen Evangelical preachers, out of six hundred clergy ; the 
other has not as many Rationalists, out of three times that 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



159 



number ! One is Episcopal, and has retained the Apostolic 
succession ; the other is Presbyterian, and without it." 

I know of but one other spot in Europe, out of which this 
spirit has departed " naked, and wounded and bleeding." 
The Church of England has, by the daily incense of her 
wholesome Liturgy, enbalmed an atmosphere around her, 
which Socinianism has never with any comfort, been able to 
breathe, and, by her Apostolic descent, has inherited a bless- 
ing, which Socinianism, with her mess of red pottage, has 
never been able to supplant. Socinianism, like a local mala- 
ria, with her train of diseases, has been invited from Geneva, 
into the ruins of a few Presbyterian and Baptist Congrega- 
tions in England, but to them has been rigidly confined ; not 
a congregation of the Church of England, throughout an 
empire on which the sun never sets, has ever caught the 
infection. Mr. Lefevre, of New-York, on his return from a 
visit to England, complains that "the system of American 
Universalism has not a single defender in England." In a 
single word, the fact — enough to make one shudder at its 
contemplation — must now be obvious, that, if Presbyterian- 
ism had retained its footing in Great Britain, the whole Pro- 
testant world would at this moment have been Socinian or 
Infidel ! During four years that it triumphed under Cromwell, 
one hundred and seventy- six sects, or forms of heresy and 
blasphemy, appeared ; and, as stated before, of two hundred 
and sixty Presbyterian Congregations that survived the 
Restoration, two hundred and forty have lapsed into Socini- 
anism. Well may the Church of England be called " The 
Bulwark of the Reformation ;" and we marvel not that 
all that touches Tier — since it touches the apple of the world's 
eye — is at once felt at the Earth's heart, and in all Earth's 
extremities ; and the least speck upon her face, like a spot 
on the great luminary in heaven, instantly attracts the obser- 
vation of the world. Still, there is the owl and the bat that 



160 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



would rejoice in her eclipse ! These are the facts that drove 
me rapidly on toward the result contemplated in this nar- 
rative. 

But give Presbyterianism the opportunity of one more ex- 
periment. Follow the " May-Flower " in her ocean-path, and 
wonder to yourself, whether the flood from the dragon's 
mouth shall pursue this woman and her child into the wilder- 
ness. Behold the Pilgrims disembark : a noble race, a virtu- 
ous people, a godly congregation, who fast, and give alms, 
and pray, and establish once more, not unaided by sons of the 
Church of England, a Christian empire, far from the contact 
and contamination of the old leaven, and fortified in fence- 
work deeper, higher, broader, than any that had been con- 
trived before. And are we to see this new empire of faith 
uprooted ? Is the same death- worm to gnaw at the root of 
the transplanted tree ? Are we to behold the same mysteri- 
ous plague-spot appear in a new clime, upon a healthy and 
vigorous frame, until from the crown of the head to the sole 
of the foot, it shall be " a leper white as snow ? " 

And tell us ye divines and ye diviners, when shall all this 
be? Shall it be soon ? Shall not generation after generation 
washed in the Lamb's blood, be placed first beyond the reach 
of sin and death ? No ! we tell you, no ! Scarcely have the 
feet of the Pilgrims touched Plymouth Rock, before the em- 
poisoned waters gush from its bosom. Scarcely have the 
children that gambolled on the decks of the May-Flower, 
grown up to manhood, ere Arminianism, at once the offspring 
and the antagonist of Calvinism — an Arminianism not ground- 
ed in Catholic truth, nor guarded by Catholic restraint, but 
guarded and grounded in the vain sanctions of human rea- 
soning, and the simple reactions of human instinct, — has over- 
spread the land, and an Egyptian darkness has stretched its 
curtain over the new empire. 

Time rolls on. Reformers again rise, and again bare their 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



161 



breasts to persecution. Whitefield, with his Episcopal orders, 
and a heart moulded in a Liturgical faith — a man of fasts 
and vigils, who, at Oxford, spent whole nights on the cold 
earth in prostration and prayer, but a man whom the Church 
of England preferred to drive from her communion, with the 
Wesleys and their companions, into schism, because she 
wanted the wisdom to employ them in her own bosom — 
Whitefield, and a few individuals like-minded, come, as 
another Moses and Aaron, to spread their hands over the 
land, and dispel the unnatural darkness, and once more we 
see New England, through Whitefield of the Church of Eng- 
land, recovering, to some extent, the faith and its practices, 
which, in the short space of a hundred years, it had unac- 
countably lost. 

But again, men who sat entranced under the burning elo- 
quence of Whitefield, what have they seen at the beginning 
of the present century ? The Church of the Puritans, after 
as fair an experiment as it was possible to make — with the 
whole ground again to itself — eaten up, to its very heart, 
with Socinianism ; and a Socinianism not imported, like the 
plague, by any intercourse with degenerate Geneva, or Halle, 
or Berlin, or Belfast, or Montauban, but springing up by the 
natural law of generation, in the moral world, from the latent 
germ, that, in a free-thinking theory, is at once the primordium 
vita and the primordium mortis to the system. The blighting 
angel drops again the cursed dew from his wing, over bright 
New England, and the pulpits of her capitals, and of her 
quiet villages ; the pulpits of her Mathers, her Davenports, 
her Hookers, her Robinsons, her Rutherfords, are occupied 
by preachers who, confronted by no Liturgy of purer times, 
preach fearlessly and blasphemously that Jesus is not " the 
true God," and that the Son and the Father are not " One." 
" I am verily afraid," said Increase Mather, in the heyday of 
Puritanism, " that, in process of time, New England will be 

14* 



162 



LOOKING FOE. THE CHURCH. 



the wofullest place in all America." " Yea, we are fain to 
that madness and folly," said Edwards, " that I am persuaded, 
if the Devil came visibly among many, and held out indepen- 
dency and liberty of conscience, and should preach that there 
were no devils, no hell, no sin at all, but these were only 
men's imaginations, with, several other doctrines, he would be 
cried up, followed, admired." And the result has made good 
these singular predictions. 

The Universalists alone, teaching that " there is no hell," 
boast of having come into possession of a thousand pulpits, 
among the sons of the Puritans, in this ill-fated land! In 
1840, they had but eighty-three preachers ; now they have 
seven hundred preachers, and eleven hundred congregations ; 
and claim, in point of numbers, to be the fourth denomination 
in the country. Nearly all New England was Socinian. 
Every old congregation in Boston, except the " Old South," 
was Unitarian. The Church that looked down so long in 
pride on Plymouth Rock itself, has yielded to" the destroying 
heresy. I have even heard that Emmons and Hopkins, the 
Calvinistic leaders, of a later day, could they come back, 
would find their Churches and flocks engulfed in the one gur- 
gite vasto. No wonder that we hear, in the middle of the nine- 
teenth century, that, in America, the lineal descendant of 
Mather the Puritan has returned to the Episcopal Church ; 
that in Germany the descendants of Luther the Reformer 
have taken refuge in the Romish Communion ; and that, in 
Great Britain, a descendant of Cromwell, the Protector, min- 
isters at the altars of the Church of England. 

As to New England, we regard the last experiment of Cal- 
vinism as made. " Ten years," says a sagacious Presbyte- 
rian divine, " will place the [orthodox] Churches of Massa- 
chusetts beyond redemption." Says the Editor of "The 
Presbyterian," " The ground they assume in the contest with 
the Socinian is absurd and futile. The latter may lie on his 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



163 



arms, without striking a blow, and confidently await the 
issue." " It has been long prepared in itself/' says a discern- 
ing Unitarian, " for a reform in its theology ; but its allegi- 
ance to the public sentiment of more sluggish communities 
has retarded it. It is laboring along, like an active steam-tug 
with a half-dozen logy ships in tow. Andover, for example, 
could she have been freed from her deference to Princeton, 
would long ago have fallen into the arms of an essentially 
liberal Christianity." This is the tendency — downward and 
downward — still everywhere downward. There is no reme- 
dy — and so the people begin to understand — but in the time- 
worn Church, to which a goodly multitude are coming back, 
with the cry, as one has uttered it, " O my Ancient Mother, 
take back a weary and heavy-laden wanderer to thy bosom ; 
give me thy yoke and thy burden, that I may find rest to my 
soul." " If the Episcopal Church had been known in New 
England," said one of her wisest and most celebrated states- 
men, to a Churchman, " we should never have been Unitari- 
ans ; we are Unitarians only in the ignorance and the absence 
of something better." And the late growth of the Church 
there appears to justify the remark. In Connecticut, where 
the chanting of the service when first introduced by Bishop 
Seabury, was laughed at and hooted by the people on the 
street as an " Indian pow-wow," there are now one hundred 
congregations that so worship God. And of Newburyport 
where the bones of Whitefield are entombed, it has been said 
of this man and that man in the list of the Episcopal clergy, 
that he was born there. That single town, as if Whitefield 
had repented in the dust, and had warned them from the dead 
to return to the bosom of their ancient mother, has given birth 
to at least twenty living pastors and divines of the Episcopal 
Church.* Yet so it must be ; for thus it is written, " the sons 
* Their names are as follows: — 

The Rev. Wm. Bartlet, St. Luke's, Chelsea. 
" " Josiah M. Bartlet, Pierpont Manor, W. N. Y. 



164 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



also of them that afflicted thee, shall come bending unto thee." 

When I first became acquainted with the facts narrated in 
this chapter and in the one preceding, I was more startled than 
if seven thunders had uttered their voices, and as much con- 
vinced as if seven angels had poured their plagues before my 
eyes on the seat of Presbyterianism. I conjure the Presbyte- 
rian to account for these frightful phenomena, by any expla- 
nation that shall not make it his first duty to abjure the sys- 
tem he has espoused. There is a semper — there is a ubique — 
there is an ah omnibus about it, that fills me with amazement. 
Why is it, I inquired that, in different languages, and in dis- 
tant lands ; sundered from each other by oceans and untrod- 
den hills ; separated even by mutual jealousies and hates ; 
antipodes to one another in education, and taste, and habits 
of life and modes of thought ; and with mutual antipathies, in 

The Rev. Moses B. Chase, Chaplain U. S. Navy. 
" " Thomas M. Clark, Trinity Church, Boston. 
" " George H. Clark, late of All Saints' Church, Worcester. 
" " Samuel A. Clark, Church of the Advent, Philadelphia. 
" " Samuel Cutler, St. Andrew's Hanover, and Trinity, 
Marshfield. 

" " Benjamin Dorr, D. D., Christ Church, Philadelphia. 
" " Samuel M. Emery, Trinity Church, Portland, Conn. 
« « William Friend, St. Peter's and Grace Churches, Port 
Royal, Virginia. 

" " Benjamin Hale, D. D., President Geneva College, N. Y. 
" " William Horton, St. Thomas's, Dover, N. H. 
" " Jacob B. Morss, St. Thomas Parish, Baltimore Co., 
Maryland. 

" " Moses P. Stickney, St. Peter's Church, Cambridgeport. 

" " Charles C. Taylor, St. Andrew's, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

« " Stephen H. Tyng, D. D., St. George's Church, N. Y. 

" " James H. Tyng, Jr. St. George's Church, N. Y. 

" " Frederick Wadleigh, St. James's Church, Abington, Vt 

" " George D. Wilde, Grace Church, New Bedford. 

•« " John Woart, Christ Church, Boston. 

" " Charles C. Adams, St. Paul's Church, Key West, Florida. 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



165 



some instances wrought up to the highest pitch by protracted 
and barbarous wars — why is it, that the religion, that has once 
divorced itself from its Bishops and its Liturgy, is downward 
and ever downward in its tendency, bequeathing her sceptre 
in all lands, without a single exception yet, first to the Soci- 
nian, and then to the Infidel ? Particularly I asked myself, 
and now I ask the candid Presbyterian, to tell me, how it is, 
that the system established by these pious men ; men of fast- 
ing and alms and prayer, of learning and untiring zeal, of 
intellectual power and virtues sufficient to have given them a 
control beyond their times ; men " of whom the world was 
not worthy " — has suffered in so short a time this awful 
retrogression ? Why is it, that a Church, which they would 
joyfully have defended with their lives, and which they guard- 
ed by an uncompromising creed and by a vigorous discipline — 
a Church, that, less than a hundred years ago, amidst a uni- 
versal re-awakening, returned for a while to the manly faith 
of the earlier Puritans — should now, again, while hearts are 
yet beating that kindled and beat under the eloquence of 
Whitefield and Brainerd and Edwards and the Tennants, 
have lapsed into Socinianism — Universalism — Deism ? One of 
their favorite divines we find, in a New- York pulpit, associ- 
ating, in a breath, the names of " Socrates and Cato, of How- 
ard and Lafayette, of Jefferson and Jesus ! " " Such is the 
era," says one of their orators in the mesmeric trance — and 
not unendorsed by a number of their clergy — " such is the 
era foreseen by David, Isaiah, Zachariah and Daniel, and im- 
pressed upon Confucius, Zoroaster, Brahma, Jesus, Moham- 
med, Fourier — it was sung on the Orphic lyres of Egypt — 
preached and anticipated by Paul — and described by John in 
the Apocalypse ! " We hear Boston divines beginning at last 
to deny the personal existence of their Maker ; and the learn- 
ing of old Harvard Uuniversity is at this moment employed 
in the grave business of seeking to convince her sons, that, 



166 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



although they be right in denying the " three that bear record 
in heaven/' yet there is sufficient reason to believe that there 
is One ? Herself the plaything of a hundred schisms and sins, 
the old New England Church is now abandoning her children 
to " the delirious wanderings of the transcendental philoso- 
phy ; " and some of her leading divines are echoing the huge 
atrocity of Germany, that Jesus was but one of a series of 
Messiahs, whom the world has a right to look for, until society 
shall be conducted by the paths of liberty and progress to its 
longed for perfection. 

Once more. That small portion of the Presbyterian Church, 
to which it has been my happier lot to be attached — what, 
said I, cautiously, within myself, is its condition? Is it also 
on the downward road to doubt and dissolution ? Let me 
think. Under my own eyes, and while enjoying, as some 
have said, " the most remarkable revival since the days of the 
Apostles," it has been rent into irreconcilable parties, which 
have ended in the adoption of opposing creeds, and separate 
communions ; the same philosophizing spirit is stalking in its 
midst, which has, all around it, entirely supplanted the old 
faith. On the principle, " Nec Deus intersit, si Deo non dig- 
nus nodus," we are told that natural causes may have dried 
up the Red Sea ; that natural causes may have rained fire on 
the plain ; that natural causes may have hung a meteor in the 
heavens over Bethlehem ; that natural causes may have pro- 
duced all the phenomena ascribed by our Lord to demoniacal 
agencies, in accommodation to the prejudices of the Jews. 
Not very far, all this, thought I, from the German discoveries, 
that the Ascension of Jesus was his disappearing in a moun- 
tain-fog, and his stilling the tempest was his settling a dispute 
among the sailors. 

And, in doctrinal theology, almost afraid that my very 
thoughts should be overheard, I yet thought within myself, 
Where do we stand ? " Original sin is an original absurdity " 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



167 



— " Imputed righteousness is imputed nonsense," — " Natural 
inability makes sin a natural misfortune, but certainly not 
sin " — " We must be willing to be damned, that God may be 
glorified, or we cannot be saved " — " We are as much indebted 
to God for sin as for holiness " — " God is as much the Au- 
thor of evil as of good" — "God was bound to introduce sin, 
as producing, through grace, the greatest possible amount of 
knowledge and of happiness" — "Regeneration is simply a 
resolution of the will, in view of motive, or is the result of 
moral suasion " — " Were I as eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I 
could by the presentation of motives, regenerate the world" — 
" When the laws of mind shall be better understood, regener- 
ation will universally take place, as the natural result of the 
proper selection and adaptation of motives " — " As God can- 
not govern the sun by motives, nor the stars by the ten com- 
mandments, so neither can He regenerate mind, and give it a 
new direction, by the direct and immediate power of His 
grace " — " Spiritual Christianity is to be henceforth the stan- 
dard ; perish forms and creeds " — " The Church must be 
re-built upon broader bases of faith " — " Its discipline must be 
altered, and other tests of communion, adapted to the times 
and the societies around us be instituted" — "The eternal gen- 
eration of the Son it is not absolutely necessary to believe " 
— " In fact, we subscribe the Confession of Faith, only as 
indicating the outline or substance of doctrine " — " And the 
old forbidding doctrine of the Atonement, an eye for an eye, 
and a tooth for a tooth, must be abandoned for that of an At- 
onement, by which man shall become morally at-one with 
God " — " for, (to use the language of one of our eminent 
divines, whose pen seems not to have understood the first les- 
son of reverence,) no debt was due from us to God, and con- 
sequently, none was paid by Christ ; we had not deprived God 
of His property ; we had not robbed the treasury of Heaven ; 
God was possessed of as much riches after the fall, as before ; 



168 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



the universe and the fullness thereof still remained His ; we 
neither owed money to the Deity, nor did Christ pay any on 
our behalf ; His atonement, therefore, is not a payment of our 
debt" 

These, and numberless like propositions, continued I to 
myself, emenating from the Edwardses, the Beechers, the 
Barneses, the Skinners, the Emmonses, the Hopkinses of 
Presbytery, have, within my own brief recollection, become 
the absorbing themes of our pulpits, our schools of theology, 
and, in the absence of a Liturgy, of our very prayers. The 
Old School, or Orthodox Presbyterians, occupying themselves, 
for the most part, the doubtful and slippery ground of the 
New Lights of the last generation, are awhile in doubt 
whether they can rally in sufficient strength to " exscind " 
their unsound brethren, or whether they shall be driven to 
secession, as the only escape from evils under which the body 
is groaning. The crisis comes. The Church is rent. Here- 
sies multiply. The Catechism, in a thousand parishes, gives 
place to " Union questions," and to " The Child's Book on 
the Atonement," " The Child's Book on the Soul and its Im- 
mortality," and perchance, " The Child's Book on the exist- 
ence of its God!" The Catechism once neglected, there is 
no possible way of commending such a system to a ripened 
understanding, in after life ; and the whole body, loosened in 
its joints and bands, is preparing for its dissolution. Even 
that portion of the Presbyterian body, which, by setting adrift 
sixty thousand communicants, aimed at becoming purer, is 
still entirely below the requirements of its Confession. The 
Sacraments, in the sense of that Confession, are almost lost ; 
the eternal generation of the Son not held to be at all essen- 
tial ; the distinction between moral and natural inability, ulti- 
mately so fatal to the system, allowed ; salvability of all, in a 
certain sense, assented to, at the necessary expense of election 
and a limited redemption ; and Princeton itself, becoming daily 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 169 



more remarkable for the patience, respect, and " delight," with 
which the student and the reader are conducted through its 
Reviews and its Exegetical Chairs, to the laboratories of the 
German theologians. In fact, the Old School Presbyterians, 
while boding that "ten years will place the Churches in 
Massachusetts beyond redemption," are unconsciously far out 
on the ebbing tide, toward the gulf of Continental Neology. 

There is certainly a chain of hands from Calvinism down 
to Atheism — Calvin reaching the hand to Luther, Luther to 
Arminius, Arminius to Pelagius, Pelagius to Arius, Arius to 
Socinus, Socinus to Messiah the Second, and even Messiah 
the Second to another, and another still, whom this theology 
teaches us to look for. At Calvin, the uppermost link of the 
theological chain, retaining yet much of its ancient Catholic 
consistency and polish, the series stops ; and between Calvin 
and Cranmer, Presbyterianism and Episcopacy, human phi- 
losophy and celestial faith, private judgment and Catholic 
consent, there is an interval, wide as the earth, high as the 
stars, and lasting as the heavens. Why then should Episco- 
palians be blamed for not wishing to bridge the gulf, or to 
break down the dividing wall ? Or why should they be de- 
rided for seeking to restore that wall, where it may have been 
weakened ? Is there not a hid treasure in its corner-stone ? 
Pray, gentlemen, desist from calling names. Pray, for a tri- 
fling, temporary advantage do not endeavor to stultify us to 
the world, and expose us to its sneer, by creating the impres- 
sion, that it is for forms and shadows that Episcopalians con- 
tend ! We will not tell you you know better ; but we do tell 
you it is high time that you knew better. The advantage this 
mode of warfare gives you, will not last you long. We bide 
our time. When Presbyterianism, where it is new, shall have 
run the course and reached the decay that it has run and 
reached wherever it is old, the world will see — alas, too late 
for many ! — that it has not been a war for forms. It is not an 

15 M 



170 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



archangel contending with Satan for the body of Moses. It 
is the Bride, the Lamb's Wife, contending with anti-Christ 
for the divine perfections of her Lord. Has she ever — has she 
ever — since the moment of the Reformation, sympathized with 
the heresies on every side of her, which not only deny that 
the Lord hath " bought us with his blood," but deny that He 
who bought us is the Lord ? Wherever Apostolical Episco- 
pacy exists — and it now belts the earth — Jesus is worshipped 
as "very God of very God;" His blood, in all places, the 
price of our redemption; His cross, save where your own 
hands <have torn it down, the symbol of our hope ; and the 
Creeds of the earliest times, recited with a lowly bowing at 
the name of JESUS. How different, where Presbytery has 
fulfilled its course — in London or in Belfast, in Paris or Ge- 
neva, in Berlin or in Boston — it matters not where — where- 
ever it has run its course, there Jesus is rejected, and his 
crown trodden in the dust. It is the " invariable antecedence 
and consequence " of the philosopher — the plain " cause and 
effect " of common sense — the semper post hoc, ergo, propter 
hoc, of all human experience. 

After attentively considering the terrible experiment of 
three hundred years, I sought in vain, to fly from the conclu- 
sion, that Presbyterianism embodies in it, by an inherent and 
innate necessity, the elements of its own decay. Certainly 
its undying worm is nurtured in the heart of its unhealthy 
bud. The punctum saliens — the principle of the system, is 
fatal to the system : the very condition of its existence fatal 
to that existence : the freethinking on which it is based, its 
own death- warrant. Its leading, hinging, fundamental article, 
" the right of private judgment," is a cup of sorceries. But 
it is a golden cup, and " the wine therein giveth its color, and 
it moveth itself aright." When once " the right" to taste has 
been established, impossible it is to fling the intoxicating bowl 
away. Deeper and deeper must the victim drink, until, in a 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



171 



wild delirium, he will suck out its very dregs. The " right of 
private judgment" is the very key, by which the intellectual 
sophistries of Calvinism are reached and detected, and, unless 
the conservative principle of Catholic consent intervene in time 
to give my mind a new and safe direction, I am lost. Yes, I 
have been myself upon the slippery descent. What held me 
back ? Calvinism as history has shown, and as the operations 
of my own mind would lead me to suspect, is the first step of 
a liberal intellect towards honest fidelity. Presbyterianism, 
with empires in her arms, has been commonly two hundred 
years, in running its course. But the individual mind, borrow- 
ing her impetus, can easily outrun her. A philosophical mind, 
like Doctor Priestly's, or a mind formed like Mr. Belsham's, 
in a physical and utilitarian mould, or an active, imaginative 
mind, like Milton's, may, in a single lifetime, run through this 
circle of opinions. Milton, to take but one of those exam- 
ples, whose fingers swept with such inimitable grace and 
grandeur the strings of a seraphic lyre, alas ! with a like faci- 
lity, almost poetic, swept over all these notes in the descend- 
ing scale of theology. Leaving the Church of Rome, and 
from political animosities, unwilling to stop at the Church of 
England, he became a Presbyterian — then, an Independent — 
next, Anabaptist — afterward, an Arian — and eventually a 
Socinian — although it is believed that later in life he returned 
to a better mind. So the freethinking mind of Watts, the 
great poet, whose words of praise form chiefly the present 
liturgy of Presbyterians, labored, it is understood, anxiously 
and painfully on the question of our Lord's divinity, while 
the chair that he occupied as a preceptor has in latter years, 
we are informed, been filled by a Socinian. 

Yes, I have stood myself upon the topmost round of this 
slippery descent, and have seen the depth as it darkened 
below me. And from my soul I bless the hand of Providence 
for interposing the faith of the earliest and purest ages as an 



172 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



alternative to my distracted breast. I ascertained that there 
was a clearer and steadier light than the sparks of reason's 
kindling, in which Christianity might be considered — not the 
light of a volcano, bursting in Germany, and leaving the 
earth strewn with ashes and cinders— not the light of a 
meteor flashing on Geneva, and leaving the heavens darker 
than in the nights of Popery — not the light of a planet, reflect- 
ing for a while the bright rays of the body from which it is 
broken, and then sinking into silence and eclipse — but the 
steady, unfluctuating light of a primitive age, all radiant with 
innumerable constellations, that, like the light of the natural 
firmament, has come down to us undimmed and unimpaired. 
O it is refreshing beyond all utterance, after following these 
human guides and wandering stars — the Luthers, and the 
Calvins, and the Wesleys, of yesterday — to see at last a 
Christianity shining with that same full-orbed light in which 
Polycarp and Ignatius and Ireneeus beheld its glory, and to 
know as a historical fact, that it is as much the same, as the 
light of the celestial bodies above us is the light that shone 
upon their natural eyes. 

I may therefore repeat, that to my mind the inference was 
irresistible and, may I not say, philosophical, that for the uni- 
form defection of Presbyterian communities from the faith, or 
their continual tendency to that defection, there must be a 
uniform cause; and that this cause must be inherent in the 
system; for the frightful phenomena are everywhere the 
same ; in empires and nations and in narrower localities, sepa- 
rated by sea and mountain, and diverse from each other in 
language, government, education, taste, and all the habits of 
mind and modes of thought. And I thought I could perceive 
that, next to the self-sufficiency of private judgment, and next 
to the principles on which they depend of exegesis and of 
argument, by which everything must be clearly defined and 
proven, the chief secret of this terrible decay is in the want 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



173 



of a liturgy to protect the faith, and of the order of Apostles 
to whom the promise was given by our Lord, " Lo, I am 
with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Though 
we say it in sorrow, we must say it in candor, aye, in fidelity 
to the Master, that, as a matter of historical fact, " the gates 
of hell" have, to an extent that should inspire the most 
serious misgiving and dismay, "PREVAILED against" the 
Presbyterian communion. Only two out-posts — one in Scot- 
land, and one in part of the United States, — and in both a sad 
breach has been made in the walls, — remain to be taken, and 
the work is done ! In this country, Presb} 7 terianism, save in 
New England, has not fulfilled its course ; and yet it is rent 
into conflicting schisms, and agitated with wild " winds of 
doctrine," and is the unhappy plaything of what one of their 
own divines has called " the eternal Eurekas of some new 
divinity." But of Presbyterianism in New England, in 
France, in Switzerland, in Denmark, in Germany, in Holland, 
in Prussia, over nearly all which countries it has had an unin- 
terrupted run and reign of three hundred years, we can speak 
now historically. Gather the Presbyterians of all these lands 
into one vast assembly, and you will find, that they have, 
almost to an individual, " denied the Lord that bought them 9 
with his blood." Ask them again, if the Bible that we 
acknowledge contains the inspired and infallible communica- 
tions of God to men, and, with scarcely a dissenting voice 
they will tell you NO ! More than three hundred years was 
Popery in laying her hand upon the laity, and repelling them 
from the cup ; but in less than three hundred, in all the coun- 
tries we have named, Presbyterianism has laid her hand upon 
the crown of JESUS, and torn it from his brow, and declared 
Him to be no God of hers. Again and again has she sur- 
rendered the Divinity of her Lord, taken off from His exalted 
Person the purple robe, and suffered Him to be crowned with 
shame and spitting. Rome, with all her abominations, never 



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LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



did it. Which then is the Anti-christ of the present day \ I 
dare not answer — but one, whom the catholic faith has always 
held to be inspired, has said. " He is anti-christ, that denieth 
the Father and the Son : " and again he says, " Many de- 
ceivers are entered iuto the world, who confess that Jesus 
Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an anti- 
christ" (£ John ii 22, 23 : II. John 7.) 

- Have you heard the dreadful news \ " said a very remark- 
able lady, and active parishioner of mine, not many years 
ago. — " another clergvman in England gone over to Rome ! ■ 

" Indeed ! * I replied ; " it is really very sad : but " (endea- 
voring to adopt my answer to one who had been nearly Swe- 
denborgianized out of the doctrine of the resurrection, and 
liberalized and spiritualized, as I had heard, into the celebra- 
tion of the communion with friend Gurnev and his compa- 
nions.) " I think he might have done worse — better believe 
too much than too little.''' But this did not damp, in the least, 
the ardor or the satisfaction with which, sometime afterward, 

she renewed the lamentation, " O, Mr. , have you 

heard the dreadful news — have you not heard it I another of 
our clergy gone over to the Papists ! " 

■ But why do they leave the Church," said I ; "do they 
believe the Church of England to be Erastianized and Puri- 
tanized beyond redemption? If so. I can only say that I 
do not agree with them." Still, after a certain interval, the 

old song came back, a O Mr. , have you heard the 

dreadful news — have you seen the papers — have you not 
heard — another clergvman apostatized ? " 

" Is it possible,"' I replied, " apostatized to what ? " 

"To Popery!" 

"Ah, indeed!" I remarked; "I did not know but you 
meant, to the Independents or the Baptists, or possibly the 
Unitarians ; however there is this consolation," said I to the 
lady, who carried the Church of England as some better em- 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 



175 



ployed ladies take their knitting, in her lap, " it is a consola- 
tion that not a speck nor mote can appear in the eye of the 
Church of England, but it seems instantly to give pain to the 
extremities of the body social ; surely this is the Church of 
God!" 

> But as this continual dropping began, in the course of time, 
to wear a little on my powers of endurance, I said one day to 
the good lady, " Oh, Miss , have you heard the dread- 
ful news ? " 

" No ! pray dont tell me, if it is any thing bad — I want to 
hear something good — but I believe there is no more any 
good — but do not tell me — any more apostacies to Rome ? 

" Worse than that," I answered very solemnly. 

" Why, what do you mean ? What can be worse than 
that ? " 

"Indeed, Miss , I wonder you should not have 

heard it — very little is said about it however — a great many 
people do not even know it — but still, I think it ought to be 
known, and I hope you will do your part in letting our pa- 
rishioners know it. How singular it is, that three or four 
men cannot leave the Church of England, for that of Rome, 
without rocking the earth to its centre and turning all faces 
black, when fifty thousand Presbyterians in Switzerland may 
deny the Lord and reject His word, and no one's equanimity 
be disturbed throughout all Christendom ! " 

" But tell me," said the lady, " that news you had to tell 
me." 

" Well, Miss , I am endeavoring to break it to you 

by degrees, as you thought you could not bear it very well 
this evening ; that is the news — not that fifty thousand, but 
that more than thirty millions of Presbyterians, in Switzerland, 
in Germany, in Ireland, in New England, in Old England, 
and wherever Presbyterianism has held sway, both pastors 
and parishes, in one terrific mass, have disowned the Trinity, 



176 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



and denied the divinity of Jesus. Now, Miss — , let me 

beg you not to make yourself so unhappy about half a dozen 
men, who imagining that our Church bids fair to run the 
same course, are seeking refuge in Rome ; but, if you must 
be unhappy, take up your lamentation over the thirty millions 
of Protestants going down this moment to the grave, and the 
fifty or one hundred millions, who have already gone, with 
the open denial on their lips of " Him who bought them with 
His blood." This was, however, a sad experiment with my 
parishioner. She never forgave me. 

And if here and there amidst the general apostacy, the 
continental mind is seen returning to some dim perceptions 
of the truth, with what crudities of mysticism or fanaticism is 
the effort marred, how partial is the acknowledgement of an- 
cient doctrine, how sceptical and mutilated the re-appropria- 
tion of the books of Scripture, how abandoned the mind to 
the theologia pectoris, as it has been termed, or the theology 
of sentiment, as the phrase imports. As the famished sailor, 
taken from a wreck, has lost the power of discerning whole- 
some and appropriate food, and impelled by blind hunger, 
seizes on the first nourishment that offers, so a German or 
Continental mind, thus waking out of infidelity, plunges at 
once, under his new impulses and new wants, into all the 
revelry of a wild and licentious divinity ; or else, as Popery 
is the only other religion within his reach, flies to her bosom 
as a shelter from his own intolerable distractions ; and we 
therefore hear without surprise, that the present family of 
Luther, for want of the purer Catholicity which Cromwell's 
descendant has found in England, and three hundred dissent- 
ing ministers have found to their heart's joy in America, have 
fled from the horrid and wild developments of Presbyterian 
metaphysics to the more genial bosom of the Papacy. 

Having now seen that, as a Presbyterian, I was not in the 
Rock-founded Church, entitled, after the death of the Tes- 



DOWNWARD TENDENCIES* 



177 



tator, to his gracious promise to be with her " until the end 
of the world," and that the gates of hell should not prevail 
against her, I felt a deep anxiety to quit the house thus fallen 
already, or else its last timbers shaking on the sand ; but be- 
lieving that the part of it in which I dwelt might " last my 
time," I had only resolution enough to introduce my children 
into a Church, already belting the earth, every where ac- 
knowledging her Lord, and now, as eighteen centuries ago, 
' continuing steadfastly in the Apostles' doctrine and fellow- 
ship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers." Yet I was 
unconsciously beginning to move in the middle path between 
Popery and Sectarianism — the too much and the too little in 
Christianity — toward what was now fast becoming the Church 
simultaneously of my affections and my understanding. An 
influence invisible attracted me on, a feeling unaccountable 
sustained me, that to go on would be be safe. I inhaled 
already the fragrant air of a morning that my eyes had not 
yet seen : 1 beheld, though at a distance still, bright gleam- 
ings from the windows of a temple that my feet had not yet 
trodden. 



[The concluding portion of this work will be put 
in hand as soon as it is received from the Author, 
and will be issued in a supplementary part for 
those who have purchased the present one ; after 
which, the two parts will be issued in one volume.] 



SeautiM Book0, 

PUBLISHED BY 

THE GENERAL PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL 
SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION. 

Depository 20 John Street, New York. 



®l)e dombcttants. 

Just Published, 
With beautiful Engravings from Designs by Darley. 

" f The Combatants' is, perhaps, the best of the 
series of allegorical portraitures of the Christian 
life which has lately issued from Mr. Monro's 
pen. An allegory, to be of any use, should prac- 
tically enforce a lesson, the theoretical truth of 
which is as widely indisputable as possible. And 
Mr. Monro, like Mr. Adams, has certainly in all 
cases followed with more or less closeness this 
general rule ; and, in the present, wherein the 
great and universal truth of the militant charac- 
ter of the Christian life on earth is well and for- 
cibly illustrated, he is quite free from one slight- 
est infraction .of it. Moreover, there are pas- 
sages in ' The Combatants,' that call up, though 
in a less degree, similar feelings to those with 



2 



BEAUTIFUL PUBLICATIONS 



which we read 1 The Old Man's Home.' There 
is more than one scene in the allegory, particularly 
the closing scenes of the lives of the imaginary 
combatants, in which we fancy that we hear the 
writer speak what he has seen and heard and 
known, and not the mere speculations of his fancy ; 
and on this account we think that this little story 
bears the palm over any of those, by the same 
author, which have preceded it." 

London Guardian. 



&t)e Dark Htoer. 

AN ALLEGORY BY THE REV. EDWARD MONRO. 

With beautiful Engravings from Designs by Chapman. 

" This is a beautiful book, and calculated to 
make a deep impression on the minds of the 
young. The allegory is admirably sustained, and 
the application most touching and pathetic." 

Young Churchman^ s Miscellany. 

" This is one of the best religious allegories 
which we have seen." 

True Catholic. 

u The conversational and narrative parts are 
happily intermingled, and it will be found both 
suggestive and impressive." 

Literary World. 



OP THE SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION. 



s 



€l)e tDanijenr, 

BV THE AUTHOR OF THE COMBATANTS, THE DARK RIVER, ETC. 

" We take the following discriminating and just 
notice of Mr. Monro's new volume of Allegories 
from the columns of our able cotemporary, the 
London Guardian. The volume is now in course 
of publication by our General Sunday School 
Union, and will be issued in the same beautiful 
style with his former volumes, and those of the 
late lamented Mr. Adams." 

Churchman. 

" Mr. Monro has added three new Allegories 
to the list of his works, under the names of 
' The Revellers, The Midnight Sea, and The 
Wanderer.' There is a calm and soothing tone 
about the volume, which makes it approach, 
more nearly than his former productions, to the 
delightful repose which characterizes the in- 
imitable allegories of the late Mr. Adams. It 
has, however, all the peculiarities of the former 
works of its author. Were we disposed to 
compare these allegories to pictures, we might 
say, that, in the first, we have a beautiful 
Claude-like landscape, encircled with architec- 
ture and figures. In the second, a grand sea- 
piece ; and, in the third, a Cuyp or a Bergheim, 



4 



BEAUTIFUL PUBLICATIONS 



where the scene is relieved by animals and a 
single picturesque shepherd. 

" ' The Revellers ' is the title of the first and 
principal allegory : and, from it, the drift and 
moral of the piece may readily be guessed. 
The characters are divided into ' Watchers 5 
and 1 Revellers,' expecting, or awaiting the com 
ing of the king : 

" 1 Their banquet was brilliant as the dance 
had been ; delicious fruits were heaped up in 
rich profusion, green, and purple, and golden- 
coloured, piled in vases of snow, brought from the 
hills; wine sparkled in cool goblets of silver, 
fretted with jems; tall crystal vases held flowers 
which drooped with the weight of their own blos- 
soms, and seemed to lie in the hot air, filling it, 
in return, with perfume. Lamps of every colour 
hung around, and shed their red and radiant 
light on the vine clusters, which seemed burst- 
ing with brightness and odorous juice. At the 
banquet sat Leila, and Hubert on one side of 
her. The same proud curl was on her lip, 
though her face was exceeding pale, and vied in 
whiteness with the lilies which crowned her hair. 
She smiled on Hubert, and Hubert forgot The- 
ophilus.' 

" Anon the banquet is disturbed with an 
alarm of the King's coming, but it turns out to 
be two of his forerunners, two terrible ones, 
(such as pestilence, or may be war and famine,) 
who spread desolation around them. But at 



OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION. 



5 



their departure, the Revellers soon resume their 
places : 

" ' Scarce half an hour had passed : the sun's 
ruddy light was just glowing on hill and valley, 
and the cock crew ; there were four figures at 
the door — Theophilus and Ada, and Una and 
Florizel — all dressed in white, and held their 
lamps in their hands, which burnt clearly, and 
shot their shadows on the wall ; near them was 
another figure, who seemed lingering behind a 
pillar ; still he was dressed in purest white, and 
held his lamp, burning, in his hand; he was 
looking down, gazing on his lamp, and an ex- 
pression of deep anxiety was on his face; he 
would not advance to the door ; and I noticed the 
marked contrast there was between him and 
Theophilus : while the former, at every sound, 
seemed startled and anxious, the latter looked 
calm and undisturbed, as of one who has set all 
in order.' 

" The second of the three Allegories, called 
' The Midnight Sea,' imagines a party of chil- 
dren playing on a sandy beach, and intent on 
collecting the vari-coloured shells, instead of pre- 
paring for their return to their island home; while 
the last on the list — 1 The Wanderer, 5 — is a sort 
of paraphrase of our blessed Lord's parable of the 
lost sheep, and is the story of a lamb wandering 
from its fold, under the guidance of a goat, but 
at length brought back by the Good Shepherd. 
We have not space for any extracts from the 



6 



BEAUTIFUL PUBLICATIONS 



two latter stories, were it possible, in so short a 
compass, to give the reader any just idea of the 
true beauties and merits of the volume, which* 
we heartily commend to a leisurely perusal." 

London Guardian. 

Jttr. TUrama' ^Ulegortes. 

" With respect to this, (Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
Progress,) the class of works which we now 
notice, may be considered as minor allegories, 
although perfectly carried out and finished. 
They have been, perhaps, more read and ad- 
mired than anything of the kind since the days 
of John Bunyan, although their best praises 
have not been loud. They have been the si- 
lent tears shed in their perusal. The * Shadow 
of the Cross' was the first allegory from the pen 
of the Rev. Mr. Adams, and its favorable recep- 
tion prepared the way for that continued series 
which has since followed, to cheer the Christ- 
mas holidays, and to impart instruction and de- 
light to thousands. It is written in the purest 
Saxon English, and filled on every page with 
touches of the most tender beauty. If for chas- 
tity of style alone, it is worthy of being read 
and admired with the finest models in the lan- 
guage. Alas ! the author of these exquisite 



OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION. 7 

productions has gone whither the cross casts 
no ' shadow,' but the noon-tide sun shines con- 
stantly, and ' sorrow and sighing are done away.' 
What we have from his pen, we treasure up and 
lay to heart. He has gone to the Eternal City, 
and to the ' Distant Hills,' which he has pic- 
tured so beautifully. Parents and others, who 
wish to furnish suitable presents for the young, 
will find at the Depository, No. 20 John-street, 
a selection of the choicest books, whose exter- 
nal embellishments accord with that which is 
written. The page on which these works are 
printed is like a little slab of Parian marble ; 
so pure, so white, so polished ; and rival the 
utmost luxury of the English press." 

Knickerbocker for Feb.. 1849. 

" We have lately had the pleasure of perusing 
three of a series of four small volumes for chil- 
dren, entitled ' The Distant Hills,' ' The King's 
Messengers,' and ' The Old Man's Home,' 
written by the Rev. William Adams, a clergy- 
man of the Church of England. One of the 
volumes, called ' The Shadow of the Cross/ 
we have not seen, but have heard it commended 
as fully equal to the rest. We can readily think 
so. We can scarcely believe that the author 
could write anything of this description that 



8 



BEAUTIFUL PUBLICATIONS 



would not be attractive and excellent ; and from 
a simple desire to express our thankfulness to 
the writer of a truly good book for children, we 
wish to call attention now to these little works. 

" We called them ' A Series' of volumes, 
quite involuntarily. They are entirely indepen- 
dent of one another, and yet they seemed, as we 
read them, to belong together. Each volume 
is a separate allegory, intended to present and 
enforce some single Christian truth or duty. 
The idea, in each instance, is a beautiful, poetic 
conception ; and nothing can be more complete, 
we may, almost say, than the perfect simplicity 
in which it is developed. The instruction is 
always presented, and never veiled in the alle- 
gory. We are continually led on in the realm 
of fancy, but we are never led away from the 
presence of Conscience by any of the imagery ; 
and then, too, the teaching is entirely Christian, 
pertaining to the very highest and most impor- 
tant duties. Indeed, we thought that the chil- 
dren for whom they were written, certainly in- 
cluded us in their number, while we were read- 
ing on ; for we found instruction which was 
quite as needful for ourselves as it could be for 
any of younger years." 

New- York Religious Paper. 



\ 



OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION. 



9 



<!()£ Ktn$j'0 Mt$sm$zxs. 

BY THE AUTHOR OP THE OLD MAN'S HOME. 

With beautiful Engravings from Designs by Weir. 

" The design of this allegory is, to illustrate 
the Christian sentiment of ' stewardship.' In 
the city of Moeticia, lying west of the dominions 
of the Great King, were four brothers — Philar- 
gyr, Megacles, Euprepes, and Sophron ; imper- 
sonations of Avarice, Fame, Ostentation, and 
Heavenly Wisdom. The allegorical representa- 
tions by which these moral qualities pass before 
us are ingeniously sustained, and the final end of 
each impressively described. The 1 King's Mes- 
sengers' are the calls of Charity. We think this 
the most ingenious of Mr. Adams' Allegories. 
The engravings are from original designs, and 
the whole execution of the work is far in advance 
of the London edition." 

Church Review. 

" This book, like many other publications of 
the G-eneral Prot. Epis. Sunday School Union, is 
adapted to the wants and tastes of adults as well 
as children. It is inimitably excellent. It 
can interest even the thoughtless, and none 
but the desperately perverse can rise from the pe- 
rusal of it without being improved ; it aims sim- 
ply at illustrating and enforcing the memorable 



10 



BEAUTIFUL PUBLICATIONS 



injunction of our Lord, " Lay up for yourselves 
treasures in Heaven ;" and it accomplishes its 
purpose in a way at once excellent and captivat 
ing. It is an allegory of a very unostentatious 
plan, so clearly and happily sustained, that from 
first to last it has all the effect of a captivating 
tale, and at the same time, keeps the attention of 
the reader constantly fixed upon the moral it in- 
culcates." 

Evergreen. 

* c This Allegory (alas, that it is the last of its 
excellent author) is designed to inculcate the 
Christian duties of alms-giving, and of kindness 
to the poor ; incidentally, contempt of the world, 
and the cultivation of a love for heavenly things, 
are also taught. 

* * * * * We recommend earnestly 
to all who have the care of children, to make 
them acquainted with it ; and will merely remark, 
that, while there is nothing, whatever, in the book 
to which the most fastidious Churchman could 
not readily subscribe, or which he would not be 
anxious that his little ones should learn, there is 
also nothing which could render a Christian of 
any other class unwilling to put it into the hands 
of his children." 

True Catholic 



PRESBYTERIAN CLERGYMAN 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



\% ©tie xrf firm Imtaif. 



CONCLUDED. 




ft cm IJork' 

GEN. PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION. 



DEPOSITORY 20 TOHN STREET. 

1853. 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year '<s53, by 
JOHN W. MITCHELL, 
(as Treasnrer of the General Protestant Ej.is?op2] Snri-y School Union,) 
In the Clerk's OSce of the District Court of the United g lates for the Southern District of New York. 



\ 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



Peculiar causes, entirely beyond the control of the Author, 
have occasioned the irregularities and delays that have oc- 
curred in the publication of this work. A large portion of it 
has been written, also, during an absolute separation from 
books, aggravated by the loss of memoranda which the 
Author had with difficulty gathered, and found it impossible 
to replace. Errors in quotations or facts will gladly be cor- 
rected in subsequent editions. 

. I F. S. M. 



THE REV. FLAVEL S. MINES. 



Born and nurtured in the bosom of Presbyterianism, graduated at her 
most honoured seat of learning in America,: himself a Presbyterian clergy- 
man of no mean reputation ; the writer of the following pages came in due 
time, by the blessing of Gob, to see the errors of that system, and to look 
earnestly for the Church most clearly identified by doctrine and usage 
with that built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus 
Christ himself being the chief corner-stone. 

Called to forsake error, he reasoned not with flesh and blood. How he 
reasoned, submitting himself to the light shining down from above on his 
faithfully continued efforts ; how he searched the records which our Lord 
Jesus Christ, fulfilling His promise to be with His Church in all ages, 
hath caused to be preserved for its most certain guidance, let these pages 
testify. 

But, was it nothing, to break asunder all the ties of youth and manhood, 
even though called as were Patriarchs, Prophets and Apostles, by no un 
certain voice, and for the kingdom of Cod's sake ? In a worldly sense it 
was the loss of all things ; but he of whom we now speak was enabled 
to take up the cross ; and to the earnest Christian man seeking for truth 
through many countries, over whom the billows of the world have rolled, 
he has left encouragement, in the certain traces of one who has but lately 
gone before. He has left — 

" Footprints that perhaps another, 
Sailing o'er Life's solemn main — 
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, 
Seeing, may take heart again." 



THE REV. FLAVEL S. MIXES. 



Being established in the faith and order of the Church, he was ready at 
a moment's warning, to go just where the way seemed appointed for him. 
After a short term of service in New York, as assistant of the venerable 
Dr. Milnor, he removed to the island of St. Croix, where he laboured, un- 
til his failing health compelling him to seek again a northern climate, he 
became, for a short time, Rector of St. Luke's Church, Rossville, Staten 
Island. From this position he was called to take the lead in the great en- 
terprise of establishing the Church on our Pacific borders. He founded 
Trinity Church in San Francisco, and there he faithfully fulfilled the re- 
maining days of his ministiy, counting not his life dear unto himself. The 
success of his ministiy was great, though attained through much tribula- 
tion. Tasks, dangers aud difficulties that appalled 'other men were assumed 
and encountered by him with a firm reliance on Divine aid, and a perse- 
verance that nothing could resist ; self-denial was his daily habit ; a power 
of self-sacrifice had been given to him when he first submitted his own to 
the Divine will. To other and bitter trials, disease, which had early 
fastened upon him, added its lingering pains and mortal sorrows ; but, 
through all, his soul remained firm, and his heart and his hands faithfully 
maintained then- devotion to Christ and His Church. He knew whom he 
had believed, and was persuaded that He was able to keep that which he 
had committed unto Him against that day. 

He is now at rest. His grave is where the setting sun bids his latest 
adieu to this land ; over it have been said the holy words, — Blessed art 
the dead who die in the Lord ; even so saith the Spirit ; for they rest from 
their labours. 



CHAPTER X. 



A DEEAI. 

Not more delusive is the worldling's hope that he may 
outwit the providence of God by hovering about the borders 
of the kingdom, so that when he shall see the approaching 
storm, and shall feel the earthly tabernacle giving way, he 
may make good his escape : than the confidence of pious 
individuals, that their portion of the Presbyterian Church 
shall not be overtaken by these consequences. As soon 
might the eye, by its vigilance, or the hand, by its vigor, 
expect to beat back the poison coursing through the veins 
of the corporeal system. There is a certain vis a tergo, as 
we have seen, invariably pressing, through every artery and 
channel of the Presbyterian body, on — on — on — to the ter- 
rible results that we have been considering. In vain do 
you resist — you who were formerly my brethren. Like the 
actor, poised upon a rope, or on a pillar's point, you will 
one day be weary of this continual effort to preserve your 
balance, and you will fall into the pit where your brethren 
are fallen. You know that misgivings constantly assail you, 
and that the hard things of your belief hang often pain- 
fully upon you, and that you are conscious of this effort to 
maintain your balance. Vain are your lamentations for the 
apostasies with which your Church has filled up the ranks of 
the Socinians ; and as vain will be your exertions to prevent 

16 



182 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



their recurrence in the future. Naturam expellas fu?-ca, tamen 
usque recurrat. As soon may you chain the death-dealing 
miasma, or hedge up the secret path of the pestilence, a"s 
check the progress of " private judgment," when, once upon 
the slope, you have let go the reins. Dash on the coursers 
must. Dash on the impetuous coursers will. There is no 
arrest till they have reached the bottom. When Calvin 
entered on his work, his heart said, 

" Jamque opus incepi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignes, 
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas." 

It was a tower, whose steps were to lead earth's sons, in 
all future time, to heaven. But shibboletns and sibboleths 
have distracted the workmen ; and what the fathers builded 
in their pride, the sons have in their folly destroyed. Is it 
not true that great numbers of your ministers, your Barneses 
and Skinners, your Stuarts and Taylors, and Bacons and 
Bushnells, ambitious only of a nullius magistri celebrity, are 
toiling to leave your theology better than they found it 1 Is 
it not true that, as an ill-taught child forgets to-day the story 
as he told it yesterday, and can never tell it the same way 
twice, so your doctrines, as expounded by your ministers, 
have never remained for fifty years the same? The last 
pastor in Dr. Mason's pulpit did not preach the preaching 
that did Dr. Mason, who forty years ago was the Cephas of 
Presbyterian Christianity. Nor does the present minister in 
Pearl-street teach or administer ordinances, as did the well- 
remembered McLeods and Romaines before him. The fatal 
leaven is leavening the lump, and the night-plant creeping 
stealthily beneath the walls. Already the destroying insect 
has deposited its egg upon your vines and olives, and the 
green things of to-day will be the withered things of to- 
morrow. Amidst it all, the Church, bright and yet brighter 
from the crucible of truth-telling time, u sibi constans, semper 



A DREAM. 



183 



eadem" and judging with her ancient saints verum non esse, 
quod variat, tells now, and will tell for ever, the same simple, 
consistent story she told when she first went forth with the 
Eleven from the cross. What necessity there is laid upon 
you I know not. I only see results. Causes are hidden ; 
effects are obvious. But do not suppose you can escape. 
Already you admire the exegesis of the Germans. Already 
their authors fill your libraries. Already your tone is low- 
ered. Already you have learned not to hate ; next you will 
begin to love. Go on with your experiments. At all hazards 
the majesty of "private judgment" is to be supported. 

" What millions died, that Caesar might be great 1" 

I fear your resistance to the Antichrist of the age will be 
short, and you will drop as a wounded bird into his hand. 
You may abjure the tyrant, but you cannot break his chain. 
You may have your moments when you would fling the 
specious cup of free-thinking to the earth, and bow before 
the faith of the ancients ; but the thirst returns, and all is 
again at stake upon the supremacy of individual reason. 

Here then is the sum of the matter. Every ecclesiastical 
system, not Episcopal, is, by virtue of the negation, Presby- 
terian. I look then over the whole Episcopal world — Euro- 
pean, Asiatic, African, American — in the mountains of the 
East — beyond the deserts of Sahara — in the islands of the 
seas — in the snows of Siberia — in the farthest Indies — in 
the wilds of Australia, and of the Western Hemisphere — 
can I anywhere find a clergyman in this vast domain who 
would deny the supreme divinity or the redemption of Jesus 
Christ, or the direct and renovating influences of the Holy 
Ghost upon the hearts of men 1 No, not one. 

Again, I look over the Presbyterian or Sectarian world — 
German, Erench, Dutch, Genevan, Scotch, Irish, English, 
Dane, Saxon, Prussian, American; everywhere Presbyte- 



184 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



rian, because everywhere disowning the order and authority 
of Bishops — how many pastors and how many flocks do I 
see, by whom the majesty of an everlasting Trinity, and the 
mystery of Redemption by the blood of Jesus, are now re- 
garded as the exploded eccentricities of the half-emancipated 
Reformers % If I must answer my own question, I will say, 
from fifteen to twenty thousand such congregations, and from 
fifteen to twenty thousand such pastors ! 

There must, said I, be something in the two theories, and 
something in the providence of God, stamping the two 
systems with such opposite results. 

If four-fifths of the Presbyterian world had been smitten 
with the plague or leprosy, paying no respect to the cordon 
sanitaire, or even to non-intercourse itself, we might have 
pronounced it the visitation of God. But for this blight 
upon the souls of men, we must look for some other cause ; 
" for God tempteth no man, and no man when he is tempted 
may say, I am tempted of God." But either the tree has its 
seeds of death within itself, or else the afflatus of the serpent 
breathes death into its branches. Satan, finding that he could 
no longer prevent the Reformation, for which the heart of the 
whole Church was inwardly breaking, may have resolved to 
urge it on, on a principle that would make the last state 
worse than the first. That principle was every man's right 
to form a faith for himself. But human reason was an 
unlawful weapon for the purpose, and the blow aimed at 
" the beast" has recoiled fatally upon the men who dealt it. 
Not satisfied with driving the sellers of indulgences from the 
temple, they must needs pull down the temple also to the 
ground. Haman perishes by the instrument erected for 
Mordecai. Periilus burns in his own brazen bull. Popery 
lives to see Socinus exulting over Calvin. Wherever Pres- 
byterianism was, Socinianism is. Lift up your eyes and see ! 
Ubi Troja fuit, jam seges ! 



A DREAM. 



185 



And as the kind reader has listened to my waking 
thoughts, I shall beg him now not to chide me for speaking 
a little in my sleep ; for his own experience may have led 
him to observe that " the heart often wakes when the senses 
slumber." 

Luther, when travailing with the birth of Protestantism, 
assures us repeatedly that he had dreams and visions, and 
personal encounters with the devil appearing to him in broad 
daylight, in a bodily shape. Melancthon saw, in a dream, a 
lone man, in the garb of a monk, thrusting his sickle into a 
boundless harvest, and was at last persuaded to join him, 
when, after the two had some time reaped together, a mul- 
titude of reapers came to help them in their labors ; and to 
this dream is due, in part, the association of Melancthon with 
Luther at the beginning of the Reformation. Frederick, the 
renowned elector of Saxony, saw, in a dream, a monk, with 
a great pen that reached to Rome, and that wounded with its 
point the ears, and shook terribly the crest, of a lion that 
was there. Empires in vain tried to break the pen ; it grew, 
and still grew, until out of it came a great number of pens. 
The elector then asked the monk to tell him Avhere he got 
that pen. That pen, said the monk, is from the wing of a 
goose in Bohemia, a hundred years old. The reader should 
be reminded that the name of Huss, to whom the dream 
alludes, signifies goose, as Leo, the name of the Pope at the 
time, signifies lion. And this dream the elector, surnamed 
the Wise, who stood in the foreground of the German 
Reformation, has related as a reason for siding with Luther 
in his labors. And thus the three felt called from above to 
open the continental reformation. Let no admirers of the 
Reformers of Germany, therefore, despise my dream. 

At a later day, the Puritans were singularly favored in 
this way, although the recent editions of such authors as 
Bunyan and Havel, I have observed, suppress the remark- 
' 16* 



186 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



able relations contained in the older biographies. But it is 
no secret that Puritanism came in, as Popery had come in 
before, and as Mormonism has come in since, and as Sweden- 
borgianism is endeavoring to come in now, under the cloak 
of inspiration, dreams, clairvoyance, and miracles. It was 
enough that a dweller in some cloister had seen the Mother 
of our Lord crowned and worshipped as the queen of heaven, 
to establish Mariolatry upon earth. Another had been 
favored with a letter from Saint " Peter and Mary, and the 
thrones and principalities of heaven," claiming universal 
jurisdiction and political supremacy for the Bishop of Rome ; 
and thus was Pepin, the king of France, persuaded to crown 
the Pope with the titles of universal empire. Another had 
seen the Host bleeding in the Eucharist, to verify the dogma 
of transubstantiation. To another it was given to see souls, 
by virtue of the mass, escaping from the fires, to make 
good the claims and the profits of purgatory. Another had 
seen particular individuals admitted to the rights of saint- 
ship, while others had dreams, to indicate the place where 
their relics could be found for the adoration of the faithful. 
It was thus that many of the pretensions of Popery were 
privily brought in. In the same way the Puritans, Baptists, 
Quakers, Mormons, Swedenborgians, as every one familiar 
with the facts must know, relied upon dreams, and revela- 
tions, and impressions, to a most fearful extent, for their j 
practices and innovations. Let no admirer of the Puritans, 

therefore, despise my dream. 

There are among us whole communities, in which, even 
now, a conversion is regarded as certainly more edifying and 
complete, if enlivened by something bordering on the super- 
natural — dreams, voices, lights, smells, sounds, or sudden 
sensations and impressions. They have perhaps heard that 
Luther and his coadjutors, that Flavel and Bunyan and their 
brethren, that Tennant and Newton and their associates, and 



A DREAM. 



187 



a host of others, have had wonderful dreams, or trances, or 
swoons, or ecstacies, as indubitable proofs of the divine 
approbation ; and they leap to the conclusion that they must 
have them too. On this Procrustean bed of conversion, Mr. 
Belsham tells us that, when a youth, he stretched himself out 
to the extent prescribed in Doddridge's Rise and Progress, 
as thousands have been taught to do ; and when exhaustion 
and reaction came on, in after years, he became a miserable 
prey to Socinianism and infidelity by turns. How often 
have we seen revival converts keeping journals of their 
frames and feelings and swoons and rhapsodies, laboring to 
work themselves into the exact experiences of some male or 
female model, until the eifort wearies, and they fall away. 
It has been often observed, that if one attempt to imitate 
another, he will be more likely to copy the blemishes than 
the graces of his model. * We have in such instances been 
often amusingly reminded of the piece of cracked china sent 
back to the celestial empire, that a whole service might be 
made according to the pattern, and which the celestials 
most scrupulously copied, even to the crack. And so with 
the journals, dreams, voices, impressions, and swoonings of 
model conversions ; the very thing to be avoided runs 
through them all. They have become so interwoven with 
the new ideas of conversion, that the subject has been 
deemed worthy of grave consideration in Dr. Alexander's 
work on " Religious Experience," published under the sanc- 
tion of the General Assembly. Without therefore disturbing 
the question, whether God "by dreams tumeth man aside 
from his purpose," if I venture, in giving this history of my 
conversion, to tell my dream, or rather to open my dark 
saying, since I have such authorities and precedents, let no 
man despise me. 

I and my father's house, and many of the people of our 
religion, were led away captive into the regions of Babylon. 



188 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



And it was my custom to walk with a certain friend by 
the banks of the river Ulai, where we hanged a harp that we 
had, upon the willows that were there ; and we spake often 
one to another of the place of our fathers' sepulchres, because 
it was desolate, and its hedges were broken down, and the 
landmarks of the ancient ones were carried away. And we 
saw that some of our brethren had set up in the plain of 
Dura, hard by the province of Babylon, an image of earth, 
washen over with gold, so that the simple folk took it to be 
gold ; but the inner part was earth ; only its feet were of 
brass, to trample and break in pieces. And the name of the 
image was Eureka ; and it had three faces. One face was 
of a man, with a high forehead, as one that understood dark 
sentences ; and he held a cold, phosphoric torch in his hand, 
whereon was written, Keason; and three cries continually 
issued out of his mouth— No Superstition, No Mystery, No 
Creed. And the second face was of a strange woman, and 
her lips were smoother than oil ; a head-dress was upon her 
head, and on it was written, Liberty ; and a cup was in her 
hand ; and three cries went day and night out of her mouth — 
No Kings, No Governments, No Dignities. And the third 
face was of a flying dragon, and he held a telescope to his 
eye, as if he saw something afar off; and on his wings was a 
scroll, whereon was written Progress ; and three cries, that 
shook the land continually, issued from his mouth — No 
Monopoly, No Property, No Inequality. 

And a day was set when all the teachers of our religion 
should be assembled in Babylon ; and I saw them entering 
through a hundred gates, multitudes, multitudes, from the 
morning until the going down of the sun. They came from 
Geneva and Wirtemberg, Montauban and Lyons, and the 
parts of Navarre and Prance ; from Belfast and Ulster, and 
the parts of Ireland ; from Cambridge and Boston, and the 
regions of New England ; Prussians and Hollanders ; Danes 



A DREAM. 



189 



and Saxons ; and the men of Heidelberg and Leipzig and 
Leyden and Berlin; they came as a great cloud over the 
land, and over the sea. And I saw among them men of 
lofty countenance, with their brow knit, as though some 
great thought occupied them ; and they seemed as gods 
walking on the ground. Yet their words were the words 
of the humble and meek ; for they said much concerning 
" parity," " despised governments," and " spake evil of 
dignities," and promised men " liberty." And between 
their eyes, upon their foreheads, where the fathers wore the 
sign of the cross, I saw that they had frontlets, and within 
the frontlets was written, " The Eight of Private Judgment ;" 
and they had every man a pair of balances in his hand, 
wherewith one might weigh a hair, and a bag of weights was- 
in their girdles. And one whispered in my ear and said, 
" This is Gog and Magog." 

Now I saw in my dream, that, when the assembly were 
set down, and there was silence, they brought in a Man, or 
one in the likeness of men ; His head and His hairs were 
white like wool, and He was clothed with a garment down 
to the foot, and girded about the waist with a golden girdle, 
and a crown of gold was upon His head. And His coming 
was on this wise : if the . sick saw Him, he was straightway 
healed of whatsoever sickness he had ; if the leper heard 
His voice, immediately his flesh came on him like the flesh 
of a little child ; if a tear from His eyes fell on any grave, 
the grave gave back its dead, and the widow's heart sang for 
joy ; if His sandal touched the waters of the sea, its waves 
slept like an infant at His feet ; if His shadow passed over 
the chains of a maniac, the chains immediately fell off, and 
the maniac came to himself ; if but His spittle fell to the 
ground, the clay where it fell opened the eyes of the blind ; 
if His fingers but touched the bread of the perishing, their 
loaves were immediately multiplied ; and wherever the poor 



190 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



" saw the print of His shoe in the earth, there they coveted 
to set their foot too." 

Then the Moderator of the Assembly rose up and said : — 
" Brothers, this is Jesus of Nazareth, gorgeously arrayed ; 
but if you will handle Him and see, you will find, that He 
hath flesh and bones as one of us, that He hath slept and 
been hungry, that He hath thirsted and been weary, that 
He hath suffered and hath died the death of mortals. Yet 
Popery, that could make demi-gods of monks and hermits, 
hath made this man a God. For fifteen centuries, the world 
had been bowing at the bare mention of His name ; and 
even our own forefathers, although they nobly refused to 
bow any longer at His name, nevertheless worshipped Him 
for a time in their hearts. Nay, it is not to be denied, that 
certain portions of our brethren worship Him still. Yet, 
there be many that would know of this learned and grave 
Assembly, whether He who on all hands is admitted to 
be a man, is at the same time God ; and, in giving your 
response to many an aching heart, let not old prejudices 
influence you. Give traditions to the winds, that have time 
to attend to them. Forget the legends of the nursery. Let 
not the opinions of early Christians and Apostles terrify you. 
Show to the world that you can think for yourselves. Re- 
member your name is Protestant ; your motto, the Right of 
Private Judgment ; your guide, the light of Reason ; your 
atmosphere, Liberty ; your watchword, Progress. But I will 
first examine Him, for it is not right that you should judge a 
man before you hear him." So he asked Him these questions : 

Who art thou % 

" No man knoweth who the Father is, but the Son ; 
neither knoweth any man who the Son is, but the Father." 
What is thy name 1 

" Emanuel ; which being interpreted is, God with us." 
Whose son art thou % 



A DREAM. 



191 



" The Son of God, the Only Begotten of the Father." 
Art thou not the son of David ? 

" David in the Spirit doth call me Lord ; how am I then 
his son % I am the Root and the Offspring of David." 

How old makest thou thyself? thou art not yet fifty 
years old 1 

"Abraham rejoiced to see my day; he saw it, and was 
glad ; before Abraham was, I am." 
When wast thou born % 

" I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, 
the First Born of every creature ; even as I said, O Father, 
glorify thou me with the glory which I had with thee before 
the world was." 

"What is thy rank % 

u Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I 
am ; on my vesture and my thigh my name is written, King 
W kings and Lord of lords." [*hj^ A^fuv-c^ d^^t *%^t€>^-^- 
Where is thy dwelling % vlAaasiAa^ ^^^HL&v 
" Where I was before. I came forth from the Father, and// 1. 
am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to 
the Father." 

What sign showest thou that we may believe % 
" If I do not the works of God, believe me not ; for what 
things soever the Father doeth, these doeth the Son likewise." 
Who made all things % 

"All things were made by me, and without me was not 
any thing made that was made ; I was in the world, and the 
world was made by me, and the world knew me not ;" " for 
by me were all things created, that are in heaven, and that 
are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, 
or dominions, or principalities, or powers ; all things were 
created by me and for me, and I am before all things, and 
by me all things consist." 

Wilt thou then show us the Father, and it sumceth us ? 



192 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



" Have I been so long time with you, and yet have ye not 
known me ] He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father." 
Dost thou then make thyself equal with God ] 
" I and my Father are one." 

How long dost thou make us to doubt ? What wilt thou 
have us to do 1 Tell us plainly. 

" That all men should honor the Son, even as they honor 
the Father." 

Then an old man, a hundred years old, who sat not far 
from " Him in the likeness of men," and whose head was 
white so that the snow could not whiten it, rose up, and 
leaning on Ins staff, he said : Brethren, to me, who am a 
child of other clays, it seemeth strange that there should be 
any question concerning tins man, whence He is. 

I grant you, that He hungered and ate ; that He thirsted, 
and drank ; that He was weary, and slept. Many of His 
first followers found it more difficult to believe Him man 
than God, and were led into an opinion that His body was 
an appearance, or phantom, and quoted for this opinion His 
being " inform and fashion as a many The writings of John 
combat this very opinion, in saying, that " every spirit that 
confesseth not that Jesus is come in the fleshy is not of God." 

I grant you, then, that He was flesh and blood ; nor can we 
spare a single proof of the delightful fact ; but I ask you to 
tell me why this fact is so often and so strongly stated in the 
Scriptures. It is nowhere said, that Paul, or Peter, or John, 
" was made flesh and dwelt among us ;" or that Esaias, or 
David, or Moses, " came in the flesh," or " was made in the 
likeness of men." But incessant pains are taken to impress 
us with the fact, that He of whom we speak was " born of a 
woman," and " took on Him the nature of men," and " was 
made flesh and dwelt among us," and was actually " seen of 
angels" To me the proofs of His Humanity are the proofs 
of His Divinity. 



A DKEAM. 



193 



I grant you, that He wept and suffered ; that He groaned in 
spirit and was troubled ; that He suffered a desertion which 
martyrs never knew ; that He endured an agony which mar- 
tyrs never felt ; that He was baptized with sweat and blood 
that never flowed from the flesh of martyrs ; that He died 
amidst a darkness that martyrs never saw. But I expect 
you to explain why apostles and a hundred millions of their 
followers may pour out their blood upon the earth as un- 
noticed as the rain, while, among all deaths before or after, 
the death of Jesus Christ stands out alone, with a virtue 
that a universe of martyrs and an ocean of their blood could 
not possess % Read the testament of the Testator, and mark 
how often, and in what amazing terms, the blood of Christ is 
named. Nay, in an hour of deep humility, when He washed 
His servants' feet, humble and meek though He was, He 
commanded that, as the streaming altar, four thousand years, 
and in a thousand lands, had pointed the nations forward to 
His death, so the red cup on the altar still should point us 
for ever backward to His blood. And. while this was the 
absorbing theme on earth, if you will believe His* servant 
John, he saw in heaven a Lamb as it had been slain, the 
only Being in the universe that had carried into heaven the 
vestiges of suffering, while prostrate thrones and principalities 
did their unwearying homage to the Lamb. 

Have you never observed in Scripture, how an immeas- 
urable gulf is spread between the Creator and the creature, 
to prevent the possibility of creature or man-worship ? But 
with respect to Jesus Christ, when the world had now been 
waiting, and the whole creation groaning, through forty 
centuries, for the Seed of the woman to bruise the serpent's 
head, a pomp and circumstance attend Him, eclipsing the 
visions of the prophets. A star is born at His birth ; a sun 
expires at His death ; and the choirs of the angels that sang 
and shouted together when man was " made in the likeness 

17 



194 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



of God," sang in a yet sweeter strain when God was made 
" in the likeness of men." The natural world, with its winds 
and its seas, obeys Him ; the world celestial, with Moses and 
Elias and its angels, ministers around Him ; the dark infernal 
world falls at His feet, and cries, " Art Thou come to torment 
us before the time'?" For three hundred years, the very 
Jews disputed not these facts, but attributed them to Beel- 
zebub, or to the Great Name stolen from the temple. Tell 
me, if you can, a name by which God is known, that the 
Scriptures do not challenge for Christ. Tell me, if you can, 
a work of God, even to the creation of the Universe, that the 
Scriptures do not ascribe to Christ. Tell me of a heaven, if 
you can, where the Scriptures do not represent the high and 
happy myriads as paying Him their highest worship. That 
this should be the case at all I call upon you to explain. 
That it should be done without one word of caution against 
mistaking Him for God, I ask you to account for. And that 
it should be done, where the Scriptures well know the ten- 
dencies of the world to man-worship, and the belief of the 
world that gods had appeared in human form, and that the 
greatest of these Avatars was yet to come, is a problem I 
demand of you to solve. 

But yourselves have heard His answers. Tell me, are they 
the answers of one who wishes to be remembered as a man, 
or as a God % Yet they are the answers of one meek and 
lowly of heart, who gave His back to the smiters, and hid not 
His face from shame and spitting, who washed the feet of the 
fishermen, and dipped in the dish with Judas, who pressed 
the cross to His bosom, and for a universe of crowns would 
not have pretended without right to the glory of the Father. 
When they of Lystra fell at the feet of Paul and Barnabas, 
to worship them, they ran in among the people, and rent 
their clothes, and cried " Sirs, why do ye these things 1 we 
also are men of like passions with you ;" but Jesus did not 



A DREAM. 



195 



lift up from the earth the women that " held him by the feet 
and worshipped Him." When Cornelius fell down to wor- 
ship at the feet of Peter, " Peter took him up, saying, I my- 
self also am a man ;" but when the same Peter fell down to 
worship at the feet of Jesus, crying, " Depart from me, for 
I am a sinful man, O Lord," Jesus did not raise him from 
his knees. When John fell down before the angel to worship 
him, the bright angel raised him up and said, " See thou do 
it not, for I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the 
prophets ;" but when the same John, with the eleven, fell 
"wondering and worshipping at the feet of Jesus," Jesus 
neither reprimanded nor forbade. In all the Scriptures there 
is not one word, to put the world upon its guard. And the 
coming of Christ, instead of destroying idolatry, has restored 
and fortified it, according to yourselves, through the space 
of twenty centuries ; while the only nation that has taken 
ground against the idolatry, is torn from its sanctuaries, and 
scattered to the winds. Six hundred years ago, a devout 
Eabbi exclaimed, "I would fain learn, out of the law and 
the prophets, why we are thus smitten with this long cap- 
tivity, which I may call the perpetual anger of God. For it 
is now above a thousand years since we were carried away 
captive by Titus ; and yet our fathers, who worshipped idols, 
and killed the prophets, and cast the law behind their backs, 
were punished only with seventy years' captivity, and were 
then brought home again ; but, for us, there is no end of our 
calamities, nor do the prophets give signs of any." 

And what have you to oppose to all this reasoning ? Only 
that you have discarded mysteries, and will believe nothing 
that you cannot comprehend. You will not acknowledge 
the Infinite, because he is infinite — the Incomprehensible, be- 
cause he is incomprehensible — God, because he is GOD! 
For my part, I adore Him, because I cannot comprehend 
Him. A being / could comprehend with my understanding 



196 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUECH. 



would no more be God than the idol I could comprehend 
within my arms. Ye say it is the province of reason to 
account for facts ; account to me, then, for the facts I have 
adduced concerning the meekest of the sons of men ; and 
beware lest, in escaping from a single fact beyond your 
comprehension, you do not involve yourselves in labyrinths 
out of which reason cannot light you. It is the province 
of reason to discover truth, not to create it. Ye talk of 
Liberty, as if liberty consisted in denying and defying truth. 
If to believe that two and two are four is to surrender our 
liberties, or is to prevent our progress, then are we all yet 
slaves, and only the brutes are free. And are we no longer 
to believe that two and two make four, because it is an old 
opinion, or because the Papists have believed it 1 No ! Let 
Truth be wedded to Liberty ; then will the healthy progeny 
be Progress. Ask not with Pilate, " What is truth ?" and, 
like Pilate, turn away and go out ; but weigh the answers 
that ye have heard Him give. To use, with slight variation, 
the words of one whom you admire, and who confesses that 
he " had his moments of conviction,"* — " If the answers of 
Socrates were those of a philosopher, the answers of Jesus 
are those of a God." Even as one of your own poetsf has 
said, " If ever God was man, or man God, Jesus Christ was 
both." I therefore give my sentence, that " This is the 
True God and Eternal Life." 

Then a young man, of exceeding beauty, whose locks were 
like the raven's, and his forehead white like the lily, and his 
cheek the color of the summer rose, and none could perceive 
that it was the hectic pencilling of a deep disease, stood up 
and said : — Brethren, it is one of our principles, and is now 
getting to be better understood, that " man is not responsible 
for his belief ;" and therefore, I have heard the venerable 
father patiently. But, I have weighed his reasonings, and 

* Rousseau, t Byron. 



A DREAM. 



197 



although they appear to have consistency and fervor, I find 
them to be but exhalations and mists from the cells and clois- 
ters of the dark ages. For me, I rejoice to say, with one styled 
"evangelical," that "I know nothing of those ages which 
knew nothing." We live in the happier, days of Light, 
Liberty, and Progress. We have carried all the outworks 
of Popery ; to-day, we take the citadel. That Jesus was in 
advance of His countrymen and times, or that He stands, if 
you please, "in the foremost list of those true heroes who 
have died in the glorious martyrdom of Liberty, braving 
torture, contempt, and poverty, in the cause of suffering 
humanity,"* many of you will admit. But do not tell us 
that He was God, because the Church through a long age of 
ignorance and tyranny believed it, for that, to an enlightened 
mind, is reason for discarding it. Do not tell us, that the 
Apostles worshipped Him and believed Him to be God, as 
the Hindoos believe in their Avatars ; for if the dogma be 
absurd, we have better facilities for detecting that absurdity 
than had the fishermen of Galilee. Do not tell us, that 
Jesus himself, feeling himself far in advance of His age and 
nation, believed himself that a God dwelt in Him ; for of 
this we have the means of more dispassionately judging than 
had the carpenter of Nazareth. We have long since agreed 
to break the spell of superstition, creed, and dogma, and 
to believe those truths alone that Reason alone can reach. 
" He that will not reason is a bigot ; he that cannot reason is 
a fool ; he that dare not reason is a slave." Our fathers took 
the name of Protestant, and did nobly in their days ; let us add 
new lustre to their name, and do as nobly in ours. What they 
began, let us finish ; they began by not bowing at the Name, 
let us finish by not submitting to the Thing. They began by 
banishing from men's eyes the symbol of atonement; let us 
finish by banishing from men's minds the dogma of the Cross. 

* Shelley. 

17* 



198 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Our watchword is Progress ; but Progress we shall never 
make, until we shall have burst the chains that have bound 
humanity these sixty centuries. We must throw off the whole 
encumbering and entangling load at once. Jesus was Mes- 
siah, if you please ; and the inspiration and the developments 
of Nature dwelt largely in him ; but there have been other 
Messiahs, and there are Messiahs still to come ; for nature 
hath understanding, and knoweth when to throw off decay, 
as a tree throweth off its dead limbs and leaves ; the whole 
creation travaileth in pain ; and the womb of our mother 
earth, made fruitful by the Spirit of Nature, is pregnant with 
the apostles of her own regeneration. I give my sentence, 
then, that Jesus was God, only as the Soul of the Universe, 
which breathes in all things, made Him a partaker at once of 
her divinity and of her agony for the world's amelioration. 
But we do not need the individual Messiah any more. The 
people have their redemption in their hands. The Spirit of 
Nature has kindled in their hearts an inspiration that many 
waters cannot quench. There is an afflatus upon the nations, 
not to be mistaken, inspiring them with the same simulta- 
neous thought, impelling them to the same enrapturing goal. 
The past is hopeless, and belongs to others ; the future with 
" hope's flowing urn" is ours. Judaism made its experiment, 
and with its iron age is gone ; Christianity has made also its 
experiment, and its age of brass is departing. The age of 
gold now glitters in our eyes. I am no prophet, and claim 
only to be a sharer of the inspiration with which the breast 
of the nations is swelling, when I utter the bursting convic- 
tion, that as Christianity emerged from Judaism, so out of 
the carcass of this gigantic worm, in its turn, a new and 
bright and glorious Trinity, of Reason, Liberty, and Prog- 
ress, is about to rise and scatter upon earth, from its bright 
wings, the dew of a celestial morning, the light of an un- 
clouded day, the magnificence of a true millennium. 



A DREAM. 



199 



So when the youth, who spake partly in the New-England 
tongue and partly in the German, had done speaking, many 
of the multitude cried out, " Messiah the second I" and threw 
garlands at his feet. But many did not approve the deed of 
them. 

And after there had been no small dissension, one rose 
and said, Brethren, ye should have hearkened unto me. 
Catholics teach dogmas ; Protestants, as the august title 
imports, should be contented with negations. We may 
never be agreed if we attempt to determine who Jesus was, 
or what was the extent and nature of His inspiration. But 
the question before us, as I conceive, requires us, not affirma- 
tively but negatively, to say what Jesus Christ was not. If 
then you are principally agreed that He was not God, let us 
not lose time on a barren dogma, but settle the question, as 
Protestants, negatively, and proceed to those matters of 
practical importance that are yet before us. 

And the saying pleased the whole multitude, and they 
held up their balances and weighed the matter, and gave 
their voices that Jesus should be worshipped as God no more. 

Then the old man, that spake at the beginning, called for a 
basin, and washed his hands, and said — " Now have the evil 
days come, when I may say I have no pleasure in them ; 
henceforth the grasshopper is a burden, and the sun, and the 
light, and the moon, and the stars are darkened. Alas, that 
I should see the day ! The glory is departed ! The ark is 
taken ! Would that the silver cord were loosed, and the 
golden bowl were broken !" And with that he fell back- 
ward, and gave up the ghost.* And I saw certain come 
around him, and they carried him out, and said, Let us die 
with him ; and they that went out were for the most part 

* A few years ago, ^he King of Holland appointed to the highest theological 
chair in his kingdom an individual of the new German school ; and when the fact 
was reported to a very aged Professor, who had survived a better day, the old man, 
like Eli, fell back in his chair, exclaiming, « Then Christianity is done for." 



200 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



superannuated men, and were chiefly from the parts of Scot- 
land, and, as I was comforted to see, from the land of my 
own nativity. 

But when the multitude gave their voices that He should 
be worshipped as God no more, I beheld a sight that but to 
remember almost turns me into stone ; His hands bled again 
in the palms, and blood issued out "from His feet and from 
His side, and I saw blood running down from His temples to 
the ground, and the crown which I saw on His head turned 
of itself into a crown of thorns, and Jesus, without any 
touching Him, was extended on a cross, and one Ananias 
caught His blood in a napkin. Then I remembered it was 
written, " They have crucified the Son of God afresh." 
Then my spirit went from me, and I fell on my face and 
desired to die, but could not, and a horror of great darkness 
came over me, and it seemed that the mountains fell on me ; 
and one came and touched me, and said, Brother, it is a 
dream, yet the dream is certain, and the thing is true, and 
I am sent to tell thee. Our brethren have almost every- 
where " denied the Lord, that bought them with His blood." 
Remember how we spake together, when I was with you, 
and with our sisters in the flesh, seeing and wondering 
whereunto all this would grow. And with that he wiped 
my eyes with a handkerchief, and said, Weep not ; only 
come out of her ; for " it is an Antichrist, that denieth the 
Father and the Son." Then I saw an angel descend upon 
earth, covered with sackcloth, and crape was on his wings, 
and tears fell from his eyes like a great rain upon the earth, 
and he cried with a voice that shook the hills and caused the 
curtains of the land to tremble, Woe, woe, woe to the in- 
habiters of the earth, and of the sea : the times are well nigh 
ripe ; that which hath let is taken out of the way, and the 
earth hath made herself ready ; the Incarnation of Evil is at 
hand ; now " shall that Wicked be revealed ;" behold, it 



A DREAM. 



201 



is at the doors ! And while I lingered, my brother, who 
came to me at the first, laid hold upon my hand, and upon 
the hand of others of my father's house, and led me into a 
path that went over the great river Euphrates, for the river 
was dried up, and I could see, at a great distance, that the 
path I was in led toward the city of Jerusalem. 

Then, many days after, as it seemed in my dream, I stood 
upon the Mount of Olives, and my feet were covered with 
the dust of my journey ; and one whispered and said, Thou 
shalt see the Bride, the Lamb's wife, to-day, and the virgins 
that stand round about her ; the King's daughter is all glo- 
rious within, her clothing is of wrought gold, and she shall 
be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework ; thou 
shalt see it with thine eyes ; only thou hast no right to enter 
through the gates, for thy feet are not washen, and thy gar- 
ments are not changed. And I saw, upon Mount Zion, the 
holy city ; and the length and the breadth of it were equal, 
and harmony was in its proportions. Its walls were of 
jasper, and were laid on twelve foundations, and in them 
were the names of the apostles, for on apostles only could the 
walls of the city of God be built. And the city had twelve 
gates ; on the north three gates, on the east three gates, on 
the south three gates, and on the west three gates ; and each 
several gate was of one pearl ; and the three gates were the 
Trinity, through which, by baptism, we must enter the hab- 
itations of Zion. And as I beheld, a great multitude passed 
by, and upon their foreheads I saw the sign of the cross, 
by which I knew that they were Catholics ; and they were 
clothed in fine linen, and by this I knew that they were 
priests. But, though their number was so great, yet order 
prevailed among them, and each appeared to know and to 
keep his place. And they were of three orders; for it is 
meet, said my interpreter, that the Three that bear record in 
heaven should have, as They have had from the days of 



202 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



Moses, in the grace of the One Priesthood, three to bear 
witness on earth. Thus they were of three orders, and the 
dress of one order was not like the dress of another order ; 
for so I knew them by their dress. And they were divided 
into companies, and the overseers of the companies had two 
staves, one they called Beauty, and the other they called 
Bands, to feed the flock; and they had mitres upon their 
heads ; only, on the head of one, I saw a tiara, unlike the mi- 
tres on the heads of his brethren ; and he that had the tiara 
claimed, when they came within the city, to sit above his 
brethren that had the mitres, which when his brethren that 
had the mitres saw, they said it had not been so from the be- 
ginning, and communed together and were sad. 

And the priests that I saw were men of every tongue and 
color and nation of the earth. And when I would know the 
meaning of this multitude, my interpreter said, Six days, a 
day for a thousand years, have passed heavily away; the 
Sabbath, to give rest to a troubled world, is near ; and these 
are the sons of Antipas, the faithful Witness, going up to the 
Sabbatical or Seventh Council of the universal Church, to 
bear testimony, for the last time, to that which was from the 
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, even to Him, which is, 
and which was, and which is to come. 

And when the multitude came up to the Mount of Olives, 
and the city was now full hi their view, and they could see its 
streets of gold and its ivory palaces, I heard them sing a Song 
of Degrees, which they sang by course, and their singing was 
like the chanting of the cherubim, and thus they sang as they 
went : — 

Beautiful ! Beautiful ! Beautiful for situation, the joy of 
the whole earth, is Mount Zion ; on the sides of the north, the 
city of the great King ! 

For there are set thrones of judgment : the thrones of the 
house of David. 



A DREAM. 



203 



O go your way into His gates with thanksgiving, and into 
His courts with praise : be thankful unto Him, and speak good 
of His name. 

Our feet shall stand within thy gates : Jerusalem. 

As we have heard, so have we seen : Jerusalem is builded 
as a city that is at unity in itself. 

Walk about Zion, and go round about her ; tell ye the 
towers thereof. 

Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces ; that ye 
may tell it to the generation following. 

Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy 
palaces ; they shall prosper that love thee. 

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy 
Ghost : 

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world 
without end. Amen. 

Thus they went into the gates of the city, which opened 
of themselves to let them in. And when they were set 
down in a place appointed, each one according to his rank, 
I saw in my dream that one came in, in the form a servant, 
and sat before the council. And lo ! upon His back the 
furrows wherewith He had been ploughed, and His face was 
marred with shame, and spitting, and the marks of blows 
that men had given Him ; and there was a crown of thorns 
upon His head ; His eyes were held with a napkin, and His 
robe was taken from Him ; and there were prints of sharp 
iron in His hands, and in His feet, and in His side, and He 
seemed as one that treadeth in the wine-press ; and one said, 
Ecce Homo I And one said, What are these wounds in thy 
hands % And He said, Those with which I was wounded in 
the house of my friends. And another said, Wherefore art 
Thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that 
treadeth in the, wine-press % And He said, 1 have trodden the 
wine-press alone, and of the people there was none with me. 



204 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Then understood I that it was the Lord. And when I saw 
the staves of the overseers, and the mitres, and the priests' 
vestments, I shut my eyes, and put my fingers in my ears, 
lest I should see or hear some fresh indignity done to Him ; 
for I had heard always, from a child, that these were the 
marks of Antichrist. But when the council saw Him, they 
cried out, above the space of an hour, " Oh ! it is the King in 
His beauty !" And they fell upon the earth, and became as 
dead men. Then they that had garments spread them in the 
way, and they that had mitres cast them down at His feet, and 
he that had the tiara threw it to the earth among the mitres 
before Him, and they cried one to another, above the space of 
an hour, " Lo ! this is our God ! we have waited for Him, and 
He will save us : This is the Lord ; we have waited for Him, 
we will rejoice and be glad in His salvation !" Then all the 
bells of the city began to ring, and the " streets were filled 
with trumpeters and players upon instruments," and the light 
of the city was clear as crystal, and the children in the streets 
cried, " Hosanna ! Hosanna ! Hosanna !" and the stones in 
the streets joined in the cry, and all the trees of the field 
clapped their hands. Then He in the form of a servant, 
looking on them with a look I never beheld until then, said, 
" It is expedient for you that I go away, but I will come to 
you again." And with that, as He breathed on them, and 
said, " Lo. I am with you alway, even to the end of the 
world," He was caught up into heaven. And I saw ten 
thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, 
casting their crowns at His feet, and they rested not day nor 
night, falling down and crying, — " Worthy is the Lamb that 
was slain, to receive honor, and glory, and might, and do- 
minion, and riches, and power, and blessing !" 

After this I saw that the whole council ate bread and drank 
wine together, and they gave each other the kiss of peace, 
and they washed each other's feet. And again there was 



A DREAM. 



205 



great joy in the city, and the streets were filled with trum- 
peters, and the bells rang so that the nations in the utter- 
most parts of the earth heard them, and came running to the 
gates of the city. And when the angels at the gates had 
washed them, and set " the sign of the Son of Man" in their 
foreheads, they let them in. And when they were entered 
into the city, I saw that some went forth to meet them and 
said, " Welcome, brothers !" And they said, " All hail !" and 
fell upon their necks and kissed them. And they said, 
"Brothers, whence come ye?" And some answered and 
said, " From the regions of Babylon, which is by interpreta- 
tion, Confusion, are we come ;" and with that they broke out 
into a song, with timbrels and dances, — " Our soul is escaped 
as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers ; the snare is broken, 
and we are escaped." 

So " I awoke, and wished myself among them." 
18 



CHAPTER XL 



SCHISM. 



As in a circle a thousand radii meet at a single point, so 
truth — I mean jnoral truth — is central in its nature, and may 
be approached by a variety of avenues. A truth in mathe- 
matics can usually be reached but by one line of reasoning, 
and depends essentially on the link that immediately pre- 
cedes it in the chain. But, in the moral world, an important 
truth is reached by many and different lines of reasoning — 
no one of them, in the present obscuration of our moral na- 
ture, demonstrative in itself alone, because God never in- 
tended that truths so high should hang by a single thread — 
but all of them, when pursued, leading by various routes to 
one result, and producing the same conviction in varieties of 
mind, by varieties of reasoning. How surpassingly grand, 
on this account, are the demonstrations of providence, of God, 
of immortality, of revelation, of judgment ! We reach the 
truth upon these points by a line of reasoning, and we won- 
der and adore. Again we go back, and by another route, we 
find ourselves at the same goal, and our wonder increases. 
Once more we set out, and still the new route conducts us to 
the old result, and new wonder fills our hearts. Away, then, 
with the boast of your exact sciences, that coldly compel be- 
lief, and bind upon living limbs the icy links of their resist- 
less chain! Away with the infidelity that demands for a 



SCHISM. 



207 



generous, freeborn mind such links and such a chain, in proof 
of God, of Immortality, of Christianity ! And away with the 
frigid sectarism, that asks of Episcopacy or Catholicity to 
produce such a line of reasoning ! No, she has no such chain 
to bind you to her altars. She has different lines of reason- 
ing for the mind, and different lines of feeling for the heart, 
by which those who have either mind or heart may see or 
may feel their way to the centre, which rests in tranquillity, 
one and the same, while all is motion and commotion around 
it. If Episcopacy be truth, like Immortality, like Christian- 
ity, like the Divinity of Jesus, it may not have its one, cold, 
convincing, and resistless ray, but it will emit its beams in all 
directions, and those beams, bright and warm, may be traced, 
by either heads or hearts, like so many radiations, to the 
common centre. 

I have conducted the reader already along different paths 
that led me to a particular and central truth, and perchance 
he has expected me, ere this, to loose my girdle, unbind my 
sandals, throw away my staff, and rest from the toils and fa- 
tigues of the journey. But if the refuge we have found be 
one that the King has prepared, there are yet other roads 
and highroads that will lead his people up to it — let us then 
set out upon another : — 

Unity is a holy reality, consecrated by the more than hu- 
man prayer, " that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art 
in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us, that 
the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me." It was 
cherished as a holy mystery in the hearts of the Apostles, who 
dwelt continually on the oneness of all things in Christ — one 
Lord, one faith, one God, one baptism, one hope, one body, 
one spirit, one Shepherd, one fold, — a vine, a tree, a temple, 
a household, a bride, a Church — the Church at Colosse — the 
Church at Corinth — the Church at Ephesus — the Church of 
Sardis, although " ready to die," still " the Church of Sardis" 



208 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



— the Church of Pergamos, although corrupted with "the 
doctrine of Balaam and of the Nicolaitanes," still " the 
Church of Pergamos" — the Church of Thyatira, although 
"suffering that woman Jezebel to seduce her servants to 
commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed to idols," still 
" the Church of Thyatira" — the Church at Philadelphia — the 
Church at Philippi — the Church at Rome — the Church of 
God — " that there should be no schism in the body" What 
if these Churches, instead of being hampered with the apos- 
tolic rod and staff of unity, had enjoyed the liberty of the 
" nineteenth century !" How soon the remedy could have been 
applied by separating from a Church thus paralysed and 
darkened by Balaam, Nicolas, and Jezebel ! 

Come with me now, kind reader, to a country-village — of 
some sixty families — on the borders of the Potomac, within 
the shadow of the National Capitol. The spot is sacred to 
me : on its green turf I gambolled in boyhood ; from its at- 
mosphere I imbibed my first ideas of Christianity ; in its 
neighborhood still live the living whom I revere ; and under 
its sod are sleeping the dead whom I love. As we enter this 
village, by a southern road, we see on an elevation at our 
right a Romanist chapel, that was never completed, and is 
already going to decay, and a fallen cross lying and rotting 
in an open church-yard. As we proceed, we see on our right 
a Methodist meeting-house upon an open common ; and, 
at the same time, on our left, an Episcopal church, to whose 
green pastures not only the sheep of the fold have free- 
dom of access, but the goat, and the ox, and all cattle are 
grazing at its doors. A little farther on, the Presbyterians 
have their place of worship, and on the western borders of 
the village is a tabernacle for the Baptists, and another for the 
Campbellites ; besides the public court-house, in which visi- 
tors and "distinguished preachers" of other and yet other 
sects continually let down their nets ; six churches, six min- 



\ 



SCHISM. 209 



isters to be provided for, and not one of them " living by the 
gospel," as the Lord ordained ; six schools to be supported, 
if each should carry out the parochial system, or otherwise 
the vital union of Christianity with education to be given up ; 
a handful of people not " dwelling together ! in unity," but 
disunited, disaffected, and now and then devoured by jealous- 
ies, and worshipping by half-dozens in a place aching to the 
eyes, and freezing to the hearts of ministers and people, and 
a standing byeword to them that hang " around the corners of 
the streets." 

Far from this home of my childhood, I now invite my 
reader to accompany me, where I have several times been, 
upon the deep. Here, in our noble ship, is a broad and well- 
swept floor, kept bright by the hands of men. Above us is 
the blue vaulted roof, made without hands. On every side 
the sea is pouring its music into its Maker's ear, and the 
" very fish leaps up and means His praise." The emblems of 
Eternity and God are all around us. It is the holy hour of 
sunset ; even the skeptic is devout ; and the child at home, 
taught by maternal love that God made the stars, and watch- 
ing from its window to see the first evening gem launched 
from its Maker's hand upon the sky, cries, " Mother ! Oh 
mother ! God has made a star t" Was ever place, was ever 
time, more suitable for praise and prayer % The heathen are 
at their rites; the Mussulmen at their devotions; the Ro- 
manists at their vespers. Where is our censer, and where 
our altar? And what has thrust them into a corner'? I 
answer, Schism. 

Once more, I beg the reader to go with me to the new set- 
tlements in our Western wilderness. We cannot, like Colum- 
bus and his men, go forth and plant the Cross, and, before we 
have climbed up into our beds, find a habitation for the God 
of Jacob. Whole years pass on ; and other years roll by ; 
and still years roll, and yet there is not unity enough to give 

18* 



210 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



either Church or sect dignity enough to rise above the misera- 
ble worship of the log-cabin or the school-house. And what 
fills all the West with this portentous difficulty 1 And what 
keeps thousands of the Western clergy, of all denominations, 
pensioners upon the East themselves, and beggars for congre- 
gations that feel no longer the least remorse or shame ? I 
answer, Schism. 

But if neither the sea nor the wilderness be a refuge, let us 
seek it among people that " lie in the region of the shadow 
of death/' But why seek we the living among the dead 1 
The shrewd mandarin exultingly demands, " How can I agree 
with you, when you are not agreed among yourselves 1 One 
of your missionaries tells me that my children are not capa- 
ble of the grace of baptism ; but you assure me that they are 
even more capable of grace than an adult. One would con- 
vince me that your bishops are to be revered; another 
teaches us that they are impostors. Some of you tell us 
there is a place of everlasting burning; but others tell us 
there is no such thing. One says your Bible is inspired; 
another affirms that it is not. Your Bible does not settle the 
questions that divide you. Your best men are not agreed." 
And while he is yet speaking, the intellectual Brahmin takes 
up the argument ; " Some of you tell us, that Jesus is the 
true God, and that we must worship Him ; but I have seen 
others of your missionaries, who declare, that to worship 
Him is as much idolatry as to worship Juggernaut. Which 
are we to believe 1 Have you no authority, no tradition, no 
watchword, no priesthood, to perpetuate in unbroken line the 
fact on this tremendous question ?" O Schism ! what a mur- 
derer thou art ! 

Look over the land, and behold the multitude of sects — 
their intermitting fits of feverish zeal — their jealousies and 
strifes — their dwarfish and dilapidated temples — their sepa- 
rate and weakened action in charities, and schools, and mis- 



SCHISM. 



211 



sions — each professing a purer doctrine than his neighbor's — 
each differing from each in his modes of worship, from the 
sealed lips of the Quaker, to the open countenance of the 
Methodist — from him of Pennsylvania, who has no sacra- 
ments, to him of Rome, who has seven — Methodist Episcopal, 
Methodist Primitive, Methodist Protestant, Methodist Radi- 
cal, Presbyterian Old School, Presbyterian New School, 
Presbyterian Associate, Presbyterian Reformed, Presbyte- 
rian Covenanter, Presbyterian Relief, Presbyterian United, 
Presbyterian Cumberland, Presbyterian Scotch, Presbyterian 
Independent, Presbyterian Seceder, Dutch Reformed, Bap- 
tist, Baptist Campbellite, Baptist Sandamanian, Baptist Chris- 
tian, Seventh-Day Baptists, Church-of-God Baptists, Seven- 
Principle Baptists, Free-Communion Baptists, Free- Will 
Baptists, Hard-Shell Baptists, Soft-Shell Baptists, Ironsides 
Baptists, Little-Children Baptists, Glory-Alleluia Baptists, 
Unitarian, Irvingites, Congregationalist Orthodox, Congrega- 
tionalist Independent, Lutheran, Lutheran Evangelical, Ger- 
man Evangelical, German Reformed, Quaker Orthodox, 
Quaker Hicksite, Restorationists, Universalists, Perfection- 
ists, Swedenborgians, Latter-Day Saints, Come-Outers, Live- 
Forevers, &c, &c, &c. — JSkeu,jam satis/ cries the reader; 
Eheu, jam satis ! cries the writer. 

As I give the foregoing catalogue entirely from memory, 
there are probably as many more that I have omitted. A 
gentleman informs me, that, travelling in the West a few 
years since, he saw on one occasion about a thousand men 
and women in a grove, rolling hoops, flying kites, playing 
ball, shooting marbles, leaping, running, wrestling, boxing, 
rolling and tumbling in the grass, the women caressing dolls, 
and the men astride of 'sticks for horses, and the whole com- 
pany intently engaged in all the sports of childhood. At 
last he ventured to ask what it meant. They told him that 
they were the little children to whom the Lord had promised 



212 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



His kingdom, and affected some surprise, that he seemed not 
to have known that it was written, " Except ye "be converted, 
and become as little children, ye shall in no case enter into 
the kingdom of God." He told them that that was true ; 
that it was very well to imitate the virtues of childhood, but 
not its foibles ; that the Apostle had said, " in malice be ye 
children, but in understanding be men and that this extra- 
ordinary conduct was the folly of childhood, without the im- 
maturity of childhood to excuse it. " We are not surprised 
that you think so," they replied; "for we are a reproach 
unto our neighbors, and they of our acquaintance do hide 
themselves from us ; but we are willing to suffer persecution 
for the kingdom of heaven's sake ; for these things are hidden, 
as it is written, from the wise and prudent, and are revealed 
unto hdbesP My friend now found that they were persons 
not to be outdone in the quotation of Scripture, and as he 
related the facts, I could not but exclaim within myself, Oh, 
the luxury of private judgment, and the blessedness of exe- 
gesis! He afterwards learned that they were a numerous 
sect, calling themselves Little-Children Baptists; and the 
reader may see in the histories of the Reformation, and even 
in D'Aubigne himself, that this sect in the 5V~.est are the gen- 
uine successors of the original Baptists in Germany, Switzer- 
land, and England, who ran many of them naked and half- 
naked, in the pretended innocence of childhood, through the 
streets, rolling and tumbling, and affecting all the sports of 
children, on the ground that the truth is revealed by the 
Spirit to babes, throwing the word of God into the fire, ex- 
claiming, says D'Aubigne, " The letter killeth, but the Spirit 
giveth life." It is well known that the origin of the Quakers, 
as well as of some other sects, now grown to be quite respect- 
able, was equally extravagant. But wherever the Episcopacy 
was respected, the Reformation was conducted to its dignified 
and glorious consummation without any such exhibitions of 



extravagance. And so it lias ever been, from the Baptists to 
the Mormons; they are carried about of the winds, and in 
approaching them with common sense, you but break your 
lance against a mill. You cannot reason, for they are mailed 
in Scripture ; if you quote Scripture, they tell you, as you tell 
Episcopalians who adduce Scripture for the church, and for 
her order and her sacraments, that you have not the Spirit. 

" Alchymists may doubt 
The shining gold their crucible gives out ; 
But faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast 
To some fond falsehood, hugs it to the last." 

Not very long ago, two clergymen of the Episcopal Church, 
travelling in Kentucky, called at a farmer's house, and not 
finding him at home, waited awhile for his return, as night 
was near, and they had occasion to claim his hospitality. By 
and bye the farmer came home, and as he rode into the yard, 
or rather after he had dismounted, sang out to his man, in 
a most extraordinary tone : 

" Go, give that horse some ears of corn, 
He has'nt had any since I've been gone, 
Glory Alleluia 1" 

Then leading the two gentlemen into the house, he said : 

" Come in, my friends, and take something to eat ; 
Go, Katy, go, cook them a portion of meat ; 

Glory Alleluia !" 

In this manner the travellers were condemned to hear 
every thing done up in " the language of Canaan," and sung 
to the same everlasting tune or tone, with the perpetual Al- 
^ leluia, until the next morning effected their release. They 
differed from their Little-Children brethren about the nature 
of regeneration, holding it to be an outpouring of the Spirit, 
whereby those who were born again were inspired, like the 
prophets, with the language of poetry. They were numerous 



214 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



in the country, and went by the name of the Glory- Alleluia 
Baptists. And yet we are to believe that all this is better than 
to have remained in the one fold of the Episcopal Church, 
which would in that case have been able to unfold her bright 
banner, with the Agnus Dei, in every vale and village of the 
West ! 

It is time to meet the questions — Who is the mother of all 
these sects 1 and — Who is the father that begat them 1 The 
father that begat them, is the unbridled lust of private judg- 
ment ; the mother that bare them, is Presbytery, who has 
carried them in her womb, and nourished them from her 
breasts. If Presbytery had never lived, then these had never 
been. Episcopacy has not brought one of them into the world. 
They are all the living generations of Presbyterianism ; and 
other children she has had, even as many more, but they are 
dead ; and there is every indication, in the throes and perils 
of the body, that others are yet to come. 

And if from wholesale sects, we pass to individual fancies 
and opinions, where " every one hath a Psalm," (a Glory Al- 
leluia,) " hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath an interpreta- 
tion," rendering him a sect, as it were, within himself, where 
shall we end ? In the parlor and the street, in the stage- 
coach and the bar-room, in the city, the sea, and the wilder- 
ness, and in mixed companies everywhere, how constantly is 
religion dragged, like her Divine Master, from tribunal to 
tribunal, to be catechised, exposed, and judged? O, how 
often has my very heart sickened, to hear the crude fancies 
and conceits of men and women, uttered with a flippancy 
that nothing could intimidate, and yet with an obstinacy that 
nothing could disturb, on themes in the midst of which Ga- 
briel adores, and into which the whole company of heaven 
"desire to look." It is said that there were times when 
" Shakspeare thought himself no poet, and Raphael believed 
himself no painter ;" but can sectarianism produce a washer- 



SCHISK. 



215 



woman or a cobbler in the land, that is not confident of 
being an infallible theologian 1 From every settled article of 
faith, one and another will clamor his dissent, and iterate it, 
and reiterate it, until you are disposed to withdraw the sacred 
thing from the unholy gaze of the lookers-on, and to leave 
the field to a combatant whose only ambition has been to 
establish a reputation for thinking for himself Ever and 
anon you meet a new Protagoras, who, according to the 
account in Plato, " had nothing but confused- notions, such as 
he had collected by desultory reading, and, instead of knowl- 
edge, had a monstrous heap of opinions, which, when com- 
pared, contradicted and destroyed each other." One you 
find asking, Can I not be saved, even if I reject this — and 
this — and this, in Christianity % Another demands, Is it ne- 
cessary to salvation that I should fast 1 — that I should receive 
the communion % — that I should be baptized ? — that I should 
be a member of the church'? And another wishes to know, 
Cannot the Mohammedan be saved % — the Jew % — the Unita- 
rian 1 — the Hottentot 1 — the Infidel ? Still another asks, Do 
you think a man is responsible for his belief? Is not a man 
safe, provided he be sincere'? Questions like those which 
the Jews put to our Lord, apparently to seek information, 
really to ensnare him in his answers, and to which it would, 
in general, convey a wrong impression to answer either yes or 
no. The intention is, not to believe more than they can help — 
not to do what they can avoid — not to yield what they can 
withhold — to pare down the terms of salvation to the minimum, 
and secure the crown of eternal life on the most reduced 
terms. Hence (O, the depths of Satan !) the artful distinc- 
tion between fundamentals or essentials, and non-essentials, 
in religion. " It is not necessary to salvation to belong to a 
church ; it is not necessary to salvation to receive the sac- 
raments; it is not necessary to salvation to believe the 
Trinity :" — go on, gentlemen ; I cannot see where you will 



216 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



stop ; revelation is itself unnecessary ; for we all believe that 
a heathen may be saved without it. How plausible this old 
reasoning in our new Adams and Eves : "The prohibition of 
a visible and outward tree it is enslaving to the mind to re- 
gard, and we honor our Maker in not imputing to Him so 
unessential a condition of salvation." Shame on such heartless 
reasoning. There may be circumstances, in which, to refuse 
a cup of cold water may bring upon my soul, at the last, the 
awful words, — " Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least 
of these, ye did it not to me." O, may my soul escape the 
woe, and gain the promise of the Preacher on the mountain, 
who said, in words that hang, as the cloud between the Israel- 
ites and the Egyptians, dark to the latter, but bright to the 
former, — "Whosoever shall break one of these least com- 
mandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the 
least in the kingdom of heaven ; but whosoever shall do and 
teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of 
heaven." I praise my Maker for having opened my eyes to 
this one thing, that whatever God has thought it necessary 
to reveal or to command, it is, for me, necessary to believe 
and to obey. 

Such is the nature of Schism. Even the sects are contin- 
ually throwing off individuals and groups, who have found 
the atmosphere too relaxing or too bracing. One has but to 
pretend to greater sanctity and a purer discipline, and he 
finds himself at once the founder of a sect ; or, he has but to 
lower the terms on which salvation may be had, and his fol- 
lowers will form around him. I heard a Presbyterian divine 
once say in a lecture to his class, that if in this country a 
man should require his disciples to walk upon their heads as 
the evidence of grace in their hearts, he would not be without 
followers. Presbyterianism throws off the discipline of her 
ancient mother ; and her children, in the retributions of Prov- 
idence, throw off hers. Who are the restless multitude, con- 



SCHISM. 



217 



stantly discussing, in all companies, questions of religion? 
Who are the leaders of the new sects, that continually spring 
up, like mushrooms in our midst ? Who are the beginners 
of new and startling opinions, that are continually crying 
" Lo, here is Christ, or lo, he is there," unsettling the com- 
munities through which they run ? Has any man ever found 
an Episcopalian indulging such ambition % I trow not ; in 
every instance that I have ever known, in the whole land, 
they have been the descendants, directly or indirectly, 
of Presbyterianism. And why should this be so? — a fact 
quite worthy to be called a phenomenon! I see the first 
reason in Scripture, that the gates of hell shall not prevail 
against the Church ; and I see a second reason in philosophy, 
that there is nothing in the mild discipline, or the moderate 
teachings, or the dignified deportment of the Episcopal Church, 
to drive men to new inventions or to infidelity. I remember 
well the terror with which, when a boy, I related my stam- 
mering "experience" before the elders; and I remember, 
when a boy, under the chestnut and the oak, discussing with 
boys the mysteries of predestination and free-will ; and I re- 
member, when a boy, my misery at the possibility of having 
been left out in the purposes of God's electing love, and my 
agony on that terrible engine of torture and revivalism, " the 
unpardonable sin," and, when my life was well-nigh faultless, 
and my heart ten thousand times purer than it now is, my 
dreadful fears that I had done " despite unto the spirit of 
grace," and my doub tings whether my heavenly Father's 
mercy could extend to " such a wretch as I." Ask not what 
fills the land with sects, and darkens it with every shade of 
novelty and infidelity ! 

Go into England, and, while you find the fifteen millions 
of her Church in solid and inseparable column, you find her 
two millions of dissenters rent again into conflicting sects, 
and never united except in combination against the Church. 

19 



218 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Go up into Scotland, and the locusts swarm about you still — 
Independents, Baptists, Wesleyans, Irvingites, Arians, Unita- 
rians, Quakers, and besides these, not less than eight well- 
known Presbyterian denominations, holding alike the West- 
minster Confession, observing alike the extemporaneous form 
of worship, clinging alike to Rouse's Psalms ; yet, without 
any available principle of cohesion, splitting upon matters 
generally indicated in their names — Burghers and Anti-bur- 
ghers — Relief and Cameronian — Associate and Reformed — 
Covenanters and Seceders — New Light and Auld Light — 
Established and Free — and so forth and so forth. Even the 
gigantic soul of a Chalmers has, under our own eyes, fallen 
into the snare of the schismatical Reformers, and rather than 
bear up awhile against odds in defence of an obviously righ- 
teous principle, which would certainly have triumphed in the 
end, has been betrayed, with more than half the ministers of 
his communion, into a fresh and fatal schism.* And the 

* It is remarkable that Dr. Chalmers, who directed some of hi3 best energies and 
efforts against dissent and schism, should, so immediately after his celebrated Lec- 
tures in London on this very subject, in a moment of impatience, under a just 
sense of wrong, have become the head and leader of the great schism that has re- 
cently taken place in Scotland ; nor can we reconcile it with the Erastianism with 
which he was imbued respecting establishments of religion. I believe it is known 
that this truly great man was very favorably affected toward the Church of England, 
and perhaps it was his Erastianism alone, or deference to the religion recognized 
in Scotland by the civil magistrate, that at one time prevented his connection 
with the Episcopal Church. I was once in England when Dr. Chalmers was in 
London, and I heard from good authority that the Doctor, on laying down a certain 
book treating of the Scottish Reformers, and of Knox particularly, made the remark, 
that he thought they had been rather in a hurry in separat ing from the Church and 
setting up the Presbyterian Communion. By the by, Presbyterians generally im- 
agine that the present kirk of Scotland is the rightful successor of the original Re- 
formed Church in that country. But it is not so. The church as reformed and set- 
tled, was Episcopal. The Presbyterians, led on by men who had been in Geneva, 
and had gotten new ideas about a more thorough reformation than that in England, 
separated from the church of the country, and set up a new and Presbyterian com- 
munion, and ultimately, with great violence, uprooted and placed under severe 
penalties the old Church of Scotland. The present Episcopal Church, only recently 
disenthralled from those penalties, and growing fast in numbers, is the only his- 
torical successor of the ancient Church of Scotland. 



\ 



SCHISM. 



219 



same tendencies to disruption and secession are constantly- 
manifested on the European continent; and it is not the 
genius of Presbyterianism, but the despotic temper of jealous 
and arbitrary governments, that has hitherto suppressed in- 
stanter the ebullitions of private judgment and the formation 
of new societies; thus strikingly verifying the sagacity of 
Melancthon, who warned the more impatient and impetuous 
Reformers, that the safe reformation of a whole church was 
a work of prudence and of time, and that, if they attempted 
to go on without the bishops, the whole thing would end either 
in division and anarchy, or in the despotism of the kings 
over the church. 

There is, there must be, something wrong. From the be- 
ginning it was not so. It was in the middle of a dark and 
stormy night, when the great drops were falling from Him 
to the ground, that the Saviour of the world, with the re- 
demption of the world upon his heart, and knowing the con- 
nection between the world's redemption and the church's 
unity, lifted His eyes in the tempest to heaven, and cried, — 
" that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and 
I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us ; that the world 
may believe that Thou hast sent Me." And there was a 
time, when His apostles carried out the Master's will, that 
there should be " one body, even as there is one Spirit ;" that 
" there should be no schism in the body ;" and when the " I 
am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ," 
instead of commending these discriminating individuals as 
more spiritual than their brethren, was the evidence to their 
apostle, that they were " yet carnal," and he gave solemn 
commandment that the schismatic, after due admonition, 
should be given back to Satan. And there was a time, after 
the apostles, when those who received from them the keys 
of the kingdom, regarded the schismatic with the abhorrence 
that they did the murderer, because the act of schism was a 



220 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



striking at " the body of Christ," and a wound to the heart 
of all believers at once ; when they regarded him as partaker 
with the parricide, because he had plunged a sword into the 
Mother that bare him ; nay, when they regarded him as vy- 
ing in guilt with the soldiers at the cross, for, said the noble 
patriarch of Alexandria who excommunicated Arius, and who 
held a seat in the great council of Nice, " That seamless gar- 
ment which the murderers of Christ would not divide, these 
men have dared to rip asunder." Make what we will of 
all this, the feeling on this subject was evidently in those 
days intense and deep, and can be as evidently traced to the 
teachings of the Master. Schism in the early church but 
gave her the opportunity to raise her voice for Unity, just as 
heresy gave her occasion to bear testimony to what had been 
the Faith from the beginning, or as spurious gospels and reve- 
lations gave occasion to settle the book of canonical Scripture. 
Even when sectarianism could count in some places more 
followers than she, still she lived to see them melt away in 
her presence like snow before the sun. Let any man read 
the case of Korah and his followers, in the sixteenth chapter 
of the book of Numbers, and then make up his mind, whether, 
for the causes commonly alleged to justify schism, God will 
hold it excusable in the last day, when all its remotest conse- 
quences shall have been brought to light. When God would 
establish a great fact or principle for the faith of after ages, 
He has uniformly done it both by revelation and by miracle. 
The credentials of the first ministers were miraculous; bap- 
tism, the laying on of hands, the preaching of the Word, the 
act of discipline on Ananias and Sapphira and others, were 
at first attended by miracle. Many were visited with disease 
and death at Corinth, for presumptuously undervaluing the 
dignity and benefits of the Lord's Supper. The great first 
schism of Korah and his company, soon after the Church had 
been organized, was punished by a signal miracle in a storm 



SCHISM. 



221 



of earthquake and of fire. So the schism and the heresy of 
Simon Magus, and of Arius, and of many others, were pun- 
ished as signally, perhaps, as the pride of Herod and the 
treachery of Judas. And is there no cloud from heaven resting 
over Geneva ? And is there nothing dark and lowering hi 
the horizon of Germany % And have we not seen the giant 
of Socinianism, with his sickle in his belt, reaping in our 
own New England, and all other fields where Presbytery 
had sown % It is not for me to doubt that precious gold and 
silver may be recovered from these ruins, as the brazen censers 
of the company of Korah were commanded to be rescued 
from the burning, " inasmuch as they had been an offering to 
the Lord." But these were the facts that led me to perceive, 
that the old Faith and the old Church must go together ; sepa- 
rate them, and you separate old friends— the soul from the 
body ; the body perishes, and the faith disappears. It is a 
transmigration into another body, that the faith will not bear. 
" There is one Body, and there is one Spirit." 

The Episcopalian will at once see that this is reasoning 
which a Presbyterian may elude, but with which he cannot 
grapple in a manly contest. How is it then to be eluded 1 
How is the fact, that the Presbyterian is now in a state of 
actual separation from the church to which all the faithful 
formerly belonged, to be excused 1 Are there no fig-leaves 
with which he may cover up the rent 1 Yes ! here comes the 
dark spirit that prompted the schism, and that first carried 
division into heaven, and then suggested schism upon earth, 
saying, " In the day ye separate, ye shall be as gods, dwelling 
and exulting in a purer and holier atmosphere ; and God, who 
looketh only at the heart, doth know, that a forbidden tree, or 
a visible church and ministry and sacraments, are externals 
and non-essentials, above which the spiritual man should learn 
to soar, honoring them rather in the breach than the ob- 
servance." " And no marvel, for Satan himself is transformed 
, 19* 



222 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



into an angel of light." Excuses for sins once committed, are 
as easily gotten at as leaves upon the trees ; and these were the 
fig-leaves with which I was to cover up the rent in the body 
of Christ : — 

The church, it is maintained, is an " invisible" body. I 
know that there is an invisible church, a blessed company 
who have gone before, waiting our coming, " that they with- 
out us should not be made perfect." They have dropped the 
body, and can be no more seen. 

One army of the living God, 

"We at His bidding bow, 
Part of the host have crossed the flood, 

And part are crossing now. 

But if the church of the Bible be, what is now pretended, 
an invisible church, then every visible thing on earth, calling 
itself church, is unscriptural and wrong ! But an " invisible 
church !" It were as rational to talk of an invisible sacra- 
ment, an invisible ministry, an invisible revelation, an invis- 
ible resurrection. In fact there are many sectarians now 
spiritual enough, with the Swedenborgians and Quakers, to 
deny the external and visible resurrection of the flesh. And 
there are others who have their invisible callings to the min- 
istry, and their invisible baptisms and communions. I have 
often heard the spiritual Calvinist affect a perfect indifference 
whether the external body should be raised in the resurrec- 
tion, and we all know that the questions are gravely enter- 
tained in the Calvinistic world, whether there is such a place 
as hell, and whether there is such a place as heaven, and 
whether the very mother shall recognize the fruit of her 
womb, or a pastor the stars in his crown, in the invisible 
state ! If then there be no such place as heaven, but it be 
a bright spiritual impalpability, and if there be no such place 
as hell, and if it be a matter of no moment that the bodies 



SCHISM. 



223 



of the just shall rise, then it is no wonder that the church it- 
self has become invisible. Where will end this effort 

" to darken and put out 

Eternal truth by everlasting doubt ?" 

An " invisible" church ! Did our Lord cast His teachings 
on the unseen wind, to float through ether to the end of time % 
Or did He not rather call men visibly around Him, and form 
them into a community, and give them sacramental signs, and 
officers, and guides, and promise to be " with them always, 
even unto the end of the world V 

An " invisible" church ! The word " church" occurs more 
than a hundred times in the New Testament* — quite often 
enough to satisfy the churchman, — and I beg the candid Pres- 
byterian to sit down and attentively compare the places, and 
mark how often it will hear the interpretation of a thing 
invisible. A pure, spiritual, invisible church at Pergamos, 
infested with the Nicolaitanes ! An invisible church at Thya- 
tira, with " that woman Jezebel" for a member ! An invis- 
ible church at Sardis, " ready to die !" An invisible church 
at Laodicea, fit only to be " spued out of the mouth" of 
Christ! 

How can the church be " invisible V " Tell it to the 
churchy" says our Lord ; how can we tell it to an invisible 
community 1 and how can a man be cast out from an invis- 

* This very striking fact has its equally striking counterpart in the circumstance 
that the words Baptism, Baptize, Baptizing, &c, occur ninety-four times in the 
Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament, besides innumerable allusions to the 
sprinkling of the heart from an evil conscience, and the washing of the body 
with pure water. That dreadful word "Baptism" ninety-four times in the Gospels 
and Epistles! I venture to say tkat, in the preaching of Presbyterians, it 
does not occur once in ninety-four sermons. Only think of St. Peter saying, 
"Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the 
remission of sins, and ye shall receive the Holy GhosV Only think of Ananias 
saymg to so intellectual a man as Saul of Tarsus, " Arise, and be baptised, and wash t 
away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord I" / / « i f 



224 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



ible church 1 Though you cast him out, if he be a good man, 
he still belongs to your " invisible" church as much as before ; 
and if he be a bad man, you cannot cast him out, because he 
does not belong to it at all. 

How can the fold be invisible? — The Shepherd prays, 
" that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and 
I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us, that the world 
may believe that Thou hast sent Me." How can the world 
discover an " invisible" unity % But let all things return to 
the faith and unity of the first centuries, and the world will 
again see, and the world will again believe. 

If the church of Christ on earth be an invisible brother- 
hood of spiritual believers, then is schism an impossible sin, 
and charity an impossible virtue. Schism an impossible sin; 
because, go where you will ; set up what sect you please ; 
cry, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Luther, and I of 
Wesley, as you may ; as a spiritual Christian, you cannot, 
by any act of visible and external separation, divide an invis- 
ible community of spiritual members ; and as schism is an 
impossible sin, so is charity an impossible virtue. Charity is 
no longer to be extended to all who have been baptized into 
one body, nor to all who eat with us the children's bread ; 
but we are to spy out those who are spiritual according to 
our ideas, and give them, and them only, our charitable fel- 
lowship, as members of our invisible communion. In the 
visible church, where doubt commences, charity begins ; in 
the invisible church, where doubt commences, charity dies 
under the new prerogative we take upon us of discerning 
spirits. Peace in a family were always easy, if we were 
allowed to choose our brothers and our sisters ; and charity 
ceases to be a virtue, where we have exercised the prior as- 
sumption of selecting who shall be our brethren. 

The church an " invisible" body ! How has such an idea 
found its way into the minds of men ? The truth is that the 



SCHISM. 



225 



histories of Presbyterianism have always been in advance of 
its theories. The " invisible" church they talk of, would 
never have been thought of, if they had not perpetrated 
schism after schism, until the identity and unity even of their 
own sect can be no longer traced. As the doctrine of pre- 
destination, (or, as its advocate Doctor Priestley calls it, of 
philosophical necessity,) which has been inherited from Cal- 
vin, to whom it descended from the Eomish Schoolmen, who 
had derived it from the Greeks, who in their turn had re- 
ceived it from the Persians, among whom it still flourishes in 
all its vigor, must be first believed, before men can find it in 
the Bible : so must Universalism, and isms without number, 
be first believed, and the proofs sought afterward. According 
to the same rule, schism is first perpetrated, and palliation 
sought for it afterward. But who can find it in the Scrip- 
tures? " Ye take too much upon you," said Korah and his 
company to Aaron and his sons, " seeing all the congregation 
are holy.'''' " Ye take too much upon you, ye sons of Levi," 
answered Moses, and the earth opened and swallowed them 
up. Korah and his company were the second of the three 
orders of the priesthood, casting off the authority of the first ; 
and, if such events of the old dispensation typify events in 
the new, then here is the order of Presbyters rising up 
against the order of bishops with the same plea, " Ye take 
too much upon you, ye sons of Aaron." Show me one in- 
stance in the Bible, where the pretence of superior purity or 
piety ever was alleged to justify a schism, and I will show 
you thousands where the possession of that purity and piety 
was demonstrated by a noiseless adherence to unity. Show 
me thy spirituality without thy unity, and I will show thee 
my spirituality by my unity. Noise is easy ; silence is se- 
vere. Rebellion is the child of nature; obedience is the 
daughter of grace. Elijah, who for his purity was carried up 
alive to heaven, would not separate himself or the seven 



226 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



thousand that had not bowed the knee to Baal, from the 
seven millions that had fallen into the pollutions of idolatry. 
Daniel, the holy captive, who inspired the lions with awe, 
did not separate from the church of his fathers, but turned 
his face in Babylon toward Jerusalem. John the Baptist 
ate the passover with Herod, and the Holy Jesus sat down 
to supper with Judas. They did not withdraw from the 
temple, though it was now a den of thieves ; nor from the 
synagogue, although Satan had his seat there. In Samaria 
our Saviour found the only schism in the J ewish church, and, 
passing by their mountain to go up to Jerusalem himself, he 
said to the woman at the well, "Ye worship ye know not 
what; we know what we worship; for salvation is of the 
Jews." "But into any village of the Samaritans enter ye 
not," He said to His first heralds. Where is schism or 
separation, in any one instance, tolerated in the Scrip- 
tures 1 

To this there can be no reply, but there will be certainly 
the retort — Why then did the Episcopal Church separate from 
the Church of Rome'? I answer, the Episcopal Church sep- 
arated from Rome in precisely the same way that she sepa- 
rated from Geneva ; that is — Rome separated from her. She 
condemned the corruptions of Rome, threw them off herself, 
and warned her children against them ; and for so doing, 
Borne anathematized her, and withdrew from her, and set up 
a schismatical communion in opposition to the Church of 
England. Both in the case of the Romanists and that of the 
Presbyterians, the separation was the work of the Separatists, 
— not of the Church. In both, the Separatists pretended to jus- 
tify their separation, simply because the Church of England 
chose to exercise, in a way which did not please them, those 
powers which are the inalienable right of every jS Tational 
Church. And that Church still calls upon both to do, as she 
has herself done ; — return from novelties to the ancient and 



SCHISM. 



227 



universal faith, and from schism to the ancient and universal 
discipline. 

Pray, do not tell us any more of your invisible church. 
For "unto what is the kingdom of God like, and whereunto 
shall I resemble if?" It is the vine and its branches ; and 
"every branch in me (in Christ) that beareth not fruit, is 
cut down, and cast into the fire." It is the vine, then, with its 
living branches and its dead. 

It is a vineyard ; and the barren fig-tree, so long the keeper's 
care, is cut down and cast into the fire : how can it be then 
the spiritual vineyard now alleged ? 

It is the company of guests at the marriage of the King's 
Son, among whom was the man without the wedding garment: 
it is not then the company of the elect and good, but the 
assembly of sacramental guests, some in a sinless and seam- 
less garment, and others in impurity and rags. 

It is the retinue of virgins going forth to meet the Bride- 
groom ; and while the lamps of five burned on, the lamps of 
five went out,^ and left their possessors in darkness and 
despair. 

Such are the parables by which our Saviour has made 
plain this important subject. The kingdom of heaven is the 
family of servants, to whom their Lord distributed the 
talents. By some these talents were improved; others 
digged in the earth, and in earth centred and buried all. 
" Cast the unprofitable servant into outer darkness : there 
shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." 

Again, saith our Saviour, it is the field of wheat and tares 
so mixed and interwoven, that even an angel's eye cannot 
discern them now. Ye are not to be continually and con- 
tinually separating from your brethren because the tares are 
among the wheat, and ye would, at the expense of unity, set 
up a purer church. What if men cast up to us that there 
are bad men in the Church % We know it ; we see the wisdom 



228 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



of it ; we can give them many reasons for it ; it is intended 
to be so ; the work of rooting out the tares would root out 
charity from the heart ; root not up the tares, lest ye root 
up the wheat ; let both grow together until the harvest. 
John bore the hypocrisy of Herod ; Jesus received the kiss 
of Judas. Are we better than the Elijahs and Daniels in 
times of apostasy ? Are we purer than he with the leathern 
girdle, or He that hanged upon the tree, that we must ever 
and for ever be separating from our brethren 1 Who, then, 
are " uncharitable 1" Those who are satisfied with the Church 
as it is and as it was, and are content to live and die in her 
bosom 1 or those who, like the ungracious child of Noah, 
take delight in exposing a parent's nakedness, leaving it to 
other hands to walk backward with the mantle % Who are 
the " uncharitable ?" They who left us, counting us as tares ? 
or we, who were willing that both should grow together 
until the harvest ? 

These continual illustrations show how the heart of our 
Lord sighed for His Church's unity. He would that the 
wheat and the tares should grow together, rather than trust 
to the judgments of men, and sacrifice to continual experi- 
ments the great principle of unity. " He knew from the 
beginning who should betray him ;" yet He never broke the 
secret to the disciples, that the bond of charity might not be 
broken. And when we think that parables have been ex- 
hausted, He returns yet again to the subject, and says that 
the Church is the net cast into the sea, which gathered into it 
both good fishes and bad. The world is the sea. Millions 
are in its bosom. It has its calms and its starry nights ; 
but the storm is often on the deep. Bleak, barren, rocky, 
and full of danger, are its shores. Whirlpools and currents, 
and shoals and reefs, lie in ambush under its deceitful face. 
This is the sea in which the fishers are to let down the net. 
Stormy may be the day, starless may be the night, dark may 



SCHISM. 



229 



be the bosom of the deep, wild may be the hurricane as it 
comes lashing its way from the mountains : still they must let 
down the net. They may have toiled the live-long night, 
and taken nothing : but still they must let down the net. 
That net, then, takes both good and bad. But let no 
opening be made, to let out the bad, for the good will leave 
it too. Depend upon it, you are mistaken. The Church is 
the Beth-esda of the world ; and we are not to say, Get thee 
away, thou miserable man, who for thirty and eight years 
hast lain here, a libel on the virtue of these waters, and art 
nothing better ; and give thy bed to one more likely to be 
healed — for thus we should turn the Beth-esda of God into 
the 'Beth-horon of man — the house of mercy into the house 
of judgment. The Church is earth's hospital, not for the 
hale, but the halt ; not for the recovered, but the conva- 
lescent. With a living bread she feeds the poor; from her 
cup she pours wine and oil into the wounds of the bleeding, 
and enables the weak to go on their way rejoicing ; at certain 
seasons, an angel, with healing in. his wings, moves upon the 
waters and imparts a fresh virtue to the wave ; and the 
heavenly Physician, with healing in his very looks, walks the 
porches of the hospital. Do not then tell us that the king- 
dom of heaven is an "invisible" Church. Schism has lost 
you a reality • do not grasp at a shadow. 

You know yourselves that this shadow does not satisfy. 
You know yourselves that you are feeling after a visible and 
more tangible union. What was the meaning of a meeting 
held in New York a few years ago, (of which I was a silent 
spectator,) for the purpose of devising a comprehensive basis 
of faith, that should recover unity — a meeting remarkable for 
its oversight of the Apostles' Creed, but not singular in its 
result, the giving existence to a new sect ? And what is the 
meaning of the more recent and abortive movement, known 
as " the evangelical alliance," from which, we are informed, 

20 



230 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



the dogma of future punishments was, out of deference to 
the Germans, well nigh excluded'? And the Bible Society, 
and the Tract Society, and the Sunday-School Unions, what 
are they all, but concessions to the great principle of visible 
Unity % What are they all, but a confession that you feel 
your columns broken and feeble before the solid phalanx in 
which Rome moves % You affect to undervalue Unity — then 
why do you tremble at the growl of the lion and the thunder 
from the Vatican 1 Has Rome truth on her side 1 Has she 
reason 1 Has she antiquity 1 Has she the Bible 1 No ! but 
she has — what you have lost — Unity. And, as an eloquent 
clergyman of New York once said, (whose name 1 might give, 
if I could from memory recite the passage without marring 
its beauty,) speaking of the sects into which the land is rent, 
"While this is so, and they are divided into sects and 
parties, the Roman eagle is hovering near, as he did over 
Jerusalem of old, biding his time, until, weary of endless 
faction and division within, and of the interminable siege 
without, the people shall in despair throw open the gates, 
and let the conquerors in." Divide et impera — divide and 
conquer — was a maxim of Rome, even when Rome was 
pagan.^ 

If " invisible" unity had been in the mind of St. Paul, why 
could he not as well have allowed one to be of Paul, and 
another of Apollos, and another of Cephas, as that one should 
now be of Calvin, and another of Wesley, and another of 
Swedenborg? No, it is a flimsy substitute for a vital and 
holy reality — a fig-leaf apron over a miserable nakedness — 
an oratorical nourish on an anniversary platform, appearing, 
as one of the three hundred and sixty-five islands of Bermuda 
is said to do, one day in the year, and again disappearing till 
its anniversary returns. It is a curious thing, living only on 
its birthdays ; at all other times, it is a union from not uniting, 
a lucus a non lucendo. Instead of a church, we go into the 



SCHISM, 



231 



Broadway Tabernacle or Exeter Hall. Instead of an altar, 
we surround a platform. Instead of priests, we are occupied 
with orators. Instead of the Bishop, the emblem of unity is 
the chair of the Dairyman's Daughter. Instead of incense to 
our Maker, a cloud of applause and dust is sent up as a grateful 
offering to the speakers. And instead of sacraments, — the holy, 
the blessed, the love-constraining sacraments, — there is a 
shaking of hands, and the curtain drops. Is it right — is it right, 
thus to suppress the symbols of unity and of communion 
with which Christ bound his Church together 1 Can any end 
on earth justify the means'? And what does such unity 
amount to % It is well known, that it is with great difficulty 
a half-dozen orators can be selected, skilful enough to step for 
a day over a platform, without treading on each other's toes. 
And not unfrequently, with all the tact and caution that are 
used, the toes are trodden, and the challenge follows, as 
promptly as a card the insult in the ball-room. We must 
confess, that the alleged union has in our judgment just the 
same existence with the alleged transubstantiation of the 
Eomanists. In either case, our external senses are not to be 
allowed to testify. One of the Live-Forevers in the West 
was asked by a gentleman, " Suppose I should put the ball in 
this rifle through your heart, would you not die 1" " No," 
said the Live-Forever, " I should not ; I might seem, to un- 
believers, to fall down and die ; but it would not be so ; for 
1 He that belie veth in me shall never die.' " The same is 
the pretence to spiritual unity ; " we may seem to dispute 
and wrangle and to be divided; but we love one another, 
and are all united, heart to heart, in the tie of spiritual 
and invisible unity. What is this, but the old argument 
for transubstantiation'? And what is all this cry about a 
spiritual Church, but downright Quakerism 1 And what 
is all this anniversary and platform unity, but a got-up 
thing, 



232 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



" Which at the best lasts not a day ; 
" Like frost-work in the morning raj, 
" The fancied fabric melts away." 

All this while, the Episcopal Church is one and the same — 
unaltered in her creed — undivided in her unity — free as the 
air — universal as the light — firm as the earth's centre — every- 
where, always, indissolubly one— the old olive tree of the 
Bible :— 

" Moored in the rifted rock, 

" Proof to the tempest's shock, 

" Firmer she roots her, the harder it blows." 

She is known to the sects, that carry their mutual strifes into 
distant lands, as the universal, the indivisible, the unalterable. 
Wherever she is found, no one is left to conjecture what teach- 
ings the nations will hear at her lips, by what prayers she will 
teach them faith's ascent to heaven, what hymns she will send 
up from ships far off at sea, by what comforts she will soothe 
the last hours of the stranger in a foreign land, with what 
solemnities she will lay him on his pillow in the dust. All 
over the world, in answer to our Lord's last prayer with the 
disciples, she is one — " often, like the seamless garment in the 
soldier's hands, just on the point of being rent," when a better 
thought comes into the minds even of her soldiers and her 
fighting-m,en, — No, it is so beautiful, " let us not rend it !" 




CHAPTER XII. 



THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 



"What, then, it may be asked, were the Eeformers to do, in 
Germany, and Switzerland, and France, and Holland, where 
the bishops were not willing to reform % Answers are easy. 
Do as Melancthon entreated them to do, and not attempt to 
go on without the bishops. Do as did Elijah and his seven 
thousand amidst the altars of Baal. Do as did Daniel and 
his companions amidst the idolatries of their countrymen in 
Babylon. Do as did John, who kept the passover with 
Herod. Do as did Jesus, who ate the supper with Judas. 
Do as did the Reformers of England, who waited in the 
days of Mary, until the time came, and God sent them His 
wonderful deliverance. These all waited, and many of them 
died in faith, not having yet received the promises, but being 
confident of this one thing, that He who had purchased the 
Church with His blood, would redeem it in due season by His 
providence. But do I blame these Reformers? I blame 
them the less, when I remember that they relied upon their 
children, when times should be more propitious, to restore the 
* Episcopacy. But the language of the children has been, " We 
are wiser than the ancients; we have more understanding 
than all our teachers." 

Now, supposing the Romanist to have been the first schis- 
matic of modern times, by violating the ancient terms of 

20* 



\ 



234: 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



unity, ill adding to the ancient creeds, and in riding over the 
authority of bishops, and in imposing new conditions of com- 
munion, who was the next that fell into the sin of schism ? 
We answer, the Presbyterians, and in identically the same 
maimer, first, by unheard-of additions to the ancient creed, 
and secondly, by annulling actually, as Rome had done 
virtually, the powers of the bishops. And there is here a 
singular historical coincidence. Until about the eleventh 
year of Elizabeth, there was but one Church in England, the 
Episcopal Church that now is. No one doubted its validity. 
Even the Pope offered to acknowledge it, reformed as it was, 
if Elizabeth would concede the supremacy. A spectacle it 
was, to make glad the hearts of angels — a whole Church 
gloriously reformed, and bright from the fires of Smithfield 
and Oxford — and not a Romanist in England, nor yet a 
Presbyterian, to break the universal brotherhood ! So things 
continued until the tenth or eleventh of Elizabeth's reign. 
About this time, some who had fled from the persecutions of 
Queen Mary to Frankfort and Geneva, returned to England, 
and brought with them the idea that the Church of England 
was not sufficiently reformed, and must be reformed further. 
They did not like the kneeling at communion — they did not 
like the surplice — they did not like the altar in the east — they 
did not like the rails around the chancel, the ring in marriage, 
the sign of the cross, and many other such things they now ab- 
horred. The bishops were now " popelings," and the Epis- 
copal order a " stirrup for Antichrist to get into the saddle," 
and the Prayer-Book, winch is now the admiration of the 
world, was the " ill-mumbled mass-book." At this the lovers 
of ancient order grew alarmed, and some drew back from the 
Reformation in despair ; and it is a remarkable fact, that in 
1570. the very year that the Romanists first separated from the 
Church of England, on the ground that she was reforming too 
far, the Puritans organized their opposition on the ground that 



SCHISM. 



235 



she would not reform far enough. Fiercer and fiercer grew 
the cry for more reforms, until at last the sympathizers with Ge- 
neva proposed a Prayer-Book with which they would be sat- 
isfied, with six hundred alterations from the one in common 
use. The Church saw at once that concession was hopeless, and 
took back her imprudent consent, at one time, to give up the 
surplice, the sign of the cross, and the kneeling at commu- 
nion. And now the cry of Popery grew louder than ever. 
Jesuits came in disguise into the Church, and by violent 
harangues swelled the cry for further reformation. The 
tumult increased. Men's minds were unsettled. Endless 
confusion followed. The result is known. The clergy of the 
Church were deprived of their livings, immured in dungeons, 
sent into exile, or executed by the common hangman, and 
often not a brother allowed to attend them to the gallows, or 
read the Burial service over them when dead.* The cathedrals 

* The following lines, by the Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth, (Eng.,) have reference to 
the case of the Rev. Mr. Lowes, who, having been for fifty years the laborious 
Vicar of Brandeston, in England, after being tried by water and the rack, was con- 
demned by Calamy, a Puritan divine, to be hung at Bury, with certain other wizards 
and witches : — 

'"Good judges, hear ray sole desire, 

And grant my latest prayer, 
That when I stand at the gibbet foot, 

A priest may meet me there !' 

"But out then spoke Judge Calamy, 

A wrathful man was he, 
'We'll have no Popish mummery 

Beneath the gallows tree!' 

""Tis hard to die on gibbet high, 

Like vile unchristian hound, 
To yield unblest my parting sigh, 

To lie in unhallowed ground! 

«' ' But I am a Priest of England's Church, 

I'll read my own funeral prayer; 
God will accept His servant's act, 

For the sake of His Son so dear.' 



236 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



were converted into stables for horses — the pleasant organs 
were broken into pieces, that their Babylonish tones might no 
more fall upon the people's ears — they broke down with 
axes and hammers the carved work of the sanctuary — the 
records of the Church were burnt — the commandments were 
torn from their place over the altar, and " the covenant" was 
set up in their stead — the Prayer-Books throughout the realm 
were collected and publicly burnt — the bones of bishops were 
dragged out of their tombs and scattered on the streets — and, 
(until the present work of restoration going on under the 
recent movement in the Church of England.) scarcely was there 
a church, as my own eyes to some extent can testify, that did 
not exhibit the remains and marks of the violence of those 
unhappy times — and it was forbidden hi any part of England 
to kneel in the communion, to wear a surplice in prayer, to use 
any portion of the liturgy, to decorate a church at Christmas, 
or to bow at the name of Jesus.* An aged archbishop laid 

"In this free English land of ours, 

No soul shall now be shriven, 
Then seek alone, as best you may, 

Your passport up to Heaven !" 

" 'Tis hard to die on gibbet high, 
Like vile unchristian hound ! — &c." 

As a special favor, he was allowed, under the gallows, before being swung off, 
to read the Burial service over himself! 

* A resolution had passed the House of Commons "that the Communion-Table 
should be removed from its place, the rails around it be pulled down, the chancel lev- 
elled, and that no man in the realm should bow at the name of Jesus." Sir Edward 
Dering opposed the decree with much feeling ; and the reader will notice the pre- 
sentiment of the back stairs to Socinianism, which was so fearfully verified, as we 
have seen, in the case of the 258 Presbyterian chapels that remained after Cromwell 
— all of them, save twenty-three, becoming afterward Socinian. 

" Hear me," said he, " with patience, and refute me with reason. Your com- 
mand is, that all corporal bowing at the Name of Jesus shall be henceforth for- 
borne. I have often wished that we might decline these questions in divinity. — I 
say it again and again, that we are not idonei et competentes judices — proper and 
competent judges in doctrinal determinations. The theme we are now upon is a 
sad point. I pray you consider severely on it. You know there is no other Name 
under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. You know that thia 



SCHISM. 



237 



gladly his hoary locks upon the scaffold, and Charles, like his 
Master, sold for pieces of money, and three days under sentence 
of death, as he was preparing to lay his head upon the block, 
exclaimed for the Church of Ins heart, in words well fit to be 
the last from a martyr and a King, — " I go to-day from a 
corruptible to an incorruptible crown !" Nor was it long 
before the people of England, grown weary of endless con- 
fusion and division, took refuge in the Church that had been 
so recently repudiated, and which to this day is the glory and 
the strength of England, for ever one, and for ever the same ; 
while the churches of Frankfort and Geneva, after which the 
Church of England was to have been remodelled, are now 
openly Socinian, and of the two hundred and fifty-eight 
Presbyterian chapels in England, remaining after the times 
of Cromwell, two hundred and thirty-five, as I have before 
stated, are Unitarian ! "What is the inference ? Where are 

is a Name above every name. Oleum effusum JVomen Ejus — His Name is as oint- 
ment poured forth ; it is the carol of His own spouse. This Name is by a Father 
styled, Mel 'in ore, melos in aure,jubilum in corde — honey in the mouth, music in 
the ear, jubilee in the heart. This— it is the sweetest and the fullest of all the 
names and attributes of God — God my Saviour. If Christ were not our Jesus, 
heaven were then our envy, wiiich is now our blessed hope. And must I, sir, 
hereafter, do no exterior reverence— none at all— to God my Saviour, at the men- 
tion of His saving Name Jesus ? Why, sir, not to do it— to omit it— to leave it 
undone — is questionable — is controvertible — is at least a moot point in divinity. 
But to deny it — to forbid it to be done ! take heed, sir ! God will never own you if 
you forbid His honor. Truly, sir, it horrors me to think of this. For my part, I do 
humbly ask pardon of this House, and therefore I take leave and liberty to give 
you my settled resolution— I may— I must— I will do bodily reverence to my Saviour, 
and that at the mention of His saving Name — JESUS. Mr. Speaker, I shall never 
be frightened from this, with that fond, shallow argument, 'Oh, you make an idol 
of a name.' I beseech you, sir, reduce this dainty species of new idolatry under 
its proper head, the second commandment, if you can ; paint me a voice ; make a 
sound visible, if you can. When you have taught mine ears to see, and mine eyes 
to hear, I may then perhaps understand this subtle argument. Was it ever heard 
before, that any man, of any religion, in any age, did ever cut short or abridge any 
W T orship, upon any occasion, to their God ? Take heed, sir, and let us all take heed, 
whither we are going ! If Christ be Jesus, if Jesus be God, all reverence, exterior 
as well as interior, is too little for Him. I hope we are not going up the back stairs 
to Socinianism ! In one word— certainly, sir, I shall never obey your order— so 
long as I have a head or an eye to lift up to heaven." 



238 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



men's eyes % For myself, I confess that I was ignorant of the 
facts. 

And as Schism opens the gates to Infidelity, so is it the 
"breach through which Popery comes in. For I wish the 
reader to bear in mind, that it was not until the eleventh year 
of Elizabeth, that Pius the Fifth undertook to excommunicate 
the queen, and authorize the separation of the Papists from 
the Church ; and this was about the time that the ultra-re- 
formers came back from Geneva, and, by throwing the Church 
of England into confusion, gave that Pope his opportunity 
and his apology. And it is equally remarkable that (except- 
ing for a brief space of six years) there was not a Romish 
bishop in England for one hundred and forty years after the 
Reformation, nor until the very year (say 1685) that the Pu- 
ritans ultimately separated from the Church. And when 
more than one hundred and seventy-six subdivisions and here- 
sies had overspread the land. Puritanism made the breach in 
the wall ; Popery then entered with the sound of a trumpet : 
and it is to my mind extremely problematical, whether the 
Popish schism would to this day have been attempted either 
in England or America, but for the confusion that thus invited 
her return. She could never, in open day, except under this 
pretext, have set up altar against altar. Remember, then, 
that the Reformation had been established one hundred and 
forty years before Rome sent her bishops into England, and 
that the opportunity was afforded her by the schism of the Pu- 
ritans. And one hundred and ten years before, (say in 1570,) 
Pope Pius V. excommunicated Elizabeth, absolved her subjects 
from their allegiance to her crown, and gave her dominions 
to the king of Spain ; and an inducement for that was given 
by the Presbyterian Protestants, who were then returning, 
with new ideas, from Geneva, and were likely to succeed in 
the outcry for a further reformation. 

How very disingenuous and unfair, then, is the charge that 



SCHISM. 



239 



the Episcopal Church is intolerant and bigoted ! Ask his- 
tory. In order to prevent schism, and appease the Calvin- 
ists, she offered to give up the surplice, the kneeling at com- 
munion, and the sign of the cross, all which even Luther and 
his followers retained; and she receded from the projected 
compromise only when she saw that she had undertaken to 
satisfy " the cry of the daughters of the horse-leech," and that 
six hundred alterations more were demanded in her ritual. 
Intolerant and bigoted ! Gentlemen, you forget ! Episcopa- 
lians did not separate from Presbyterians ; Episcopalians did 
not foment secession in Geneva, where Presbyterianism held 
the field. But Presbyterians from Geneva and Papists from 
Rome did foment and did accomplish schism in the reformed 
and quiet churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Pres- 
byterians too, let it be remembered, separated from them for 
an offensive reason, openly and constantly avowed ; 

" For then a bishop or a priest 
Were held for ' limbs of Antichrist? " 

and I am at a loss to say, whether it strikes me as more 
strange that they should represent the Episcopal Church as 
bigoted and intolerant, when she did not repudiate them, 
but they repudiated her ; or that they should now desire her 
amalgamation with the " denominations," when she has not 
made one of the six hundred alterations they demanded, at 
the time they denounced her as " a vile old withered harlot." 

But, supposing the Presbyterians had separated for a less 
offensive reason, is the Church of Christ to vary her terms, to 
reconstruct her liturgy, to remodel her orders, to alter her 
faith, and to chisel another door into her pulpits, as often as 
a new sect appears ? Where could she draw her lines 1 The 
English Unitarian would say, " I am known in England as one 
of the original Presbyterians, established about the times of 
Cromwell ; admit me to your pulpits." And while he is yet 



240 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



speaking, the German Transcendentalist would say, " I am a 
Presbyterian, older than the former, in direct succession from 
the days of Luther ; admit me to your pulpits." And while 
he is yet speaking, the Geneva Socinian would say, " I am a 
Presbyterian, and have lifted my voice in the cathedral, as I 
have derived my succession from the hands, of Calvin him- 
self ; admit me to your pulpits." And, in the rear of these, 
I see Arians, Mormons, Baptists, Campbellites, Swedenborg- 
ians, Methodists, Independents, and a multitude more, dark- 
ening the road for leagues. Is it possible that the Church can 
go into details with all these, examining their claims, and 
listening to their tedious interpretations ? It would occupy 
her whole existence! But she has general principles with 
which she meets them all : — " We did not separate from 
you ; you separated from us. You have all alike departed 
from the ancient creed, and substituted your own confessions. 
You have all alike departed from the ancient discipline and 
ministerial succession, and substituted new ones of your 
own." No, the Church never banished them. They took a 
portion of her goods and went their way ; and now that their 
good things are spent, as we have seen, still, like the loving 
parent, she will welcome their return, and will run and fall 
upon their necks, and kiss them, and put the ring of reconcil- 
iation on their hands, and lead them with songs and timbrels 
to the banquet. 

The sorrow that I now felt, at the discovery that my own 
communion was the first, the very first, to open the grand 
modern drama of schism, was not to be described. I felt 
that I had taken part in the scenes, and that, remembering the 
Church as she looked forth in England, " as the morning, fair 
as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with 
banners," I was now keeping the raiment of them that had 
accused and stoned her. As I said before, like the Wesley- 
ans, they had no intention at the beginning, of perpetrating 



SCHISM. 



241 



schism. But schism once accomplished, like the boy's first 
oath, like the youth's first game of chance, like the maiden's 
first false step, makes the sequel easy. The French tell us : 
Ce nest que le premier pas qui coute ; and the Latins, Fa- 
cilis descensus. How was it with the Methodists % Wesley, 
their founder, said in 1739 : "A clergyman desiring to know 
in what point we differed from the Church of England, I an- 
swered, To the best of my knowledge, in none." Twenty- 
seven years after, he said again: "We are not dissenters 
from the Church, and will do nothing willingly which tends 
to a separation from it. Our service is not such as super- 
sedes the Church service, [for it was not held at the same 
hours,] and we never designed it should." In 1789, half a 
century after the first of these declarations, he said again : 
" I never had any design of separating from the Church. I 
have now no such design, and I declare once more, that I live 
and die a member of the Church of England, and that none 
who regard my judgment or advice will ever separate from 
it." And again, hear his dying charge, as I may call it ; his 
sermon at Cork, only ten months before he went to his account, 
upon the text, " No man taketh this honor upon himself, but 
he that is called of God, as was Aaron :" " Did we ever ap- 
point you," said the Presbyter, " to administer sacraments % 
to exercise the priestly office 1 Such a design never entered 
into our minds ; it was the farthest from our thoughts. . . . 
In doing it, you renounce the first principle of Methodism, 
which was wholly and solely to preach the gospel. The first 
attempt of this kind was made, I apprehend, at Norwich. 
One of our preachers there yielded to the importunity of a 
few of the people, and baptized their children ; but as soon as 
it was known, he was informed it must not be, unless he de- 
signed to leave our connection ; and he promised to do it no 
more. As long as Methodists keep to this plan, they cannot 
separate from the Church; and this is our peculiar glory. 

21 



242 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



It is new upon the earth. . . . The Methodists are not a 
sect or party ; they are still members of the Church ; such 
they desire to live and to die. And this, I believe, is one 
reason why God is pleased to continue my life so long, to 
confirm them in their present purpose, not to separate from 
the Church. ... It does by no means follow that ye are 
commissioned to baptize or to administer the Lord's Supper. 
Ye never dreamed of this for ten or twenty years after ye 
began to preach ; ye did not then, like Korah, Dathan, and 
Abiram, seek the priesthood also ; ye knew that ' no man 
taketh this honor upon himself, but he that is called of God, 
as was Aaron.' .... You were yourselves first called in the 
Church of England ; and though ye have, and will have, a 
thousand temptations to leave it, and set up for yourselves, 
regard them not ; be Church of England men still. n No ! 
Mr. Wesley and his preachers had no more intention of 
perpetrating schism, than the preachers and exhorters upon 
temperance or anti-slavery had, at the first, of establishing 
separate communions; but both have accomplished what 
neither of them purposed. 

And how was it with the Presbyterians? What were 
their views, once, of the sin of schism? When, in 1643, 
they gained the upper hand in Parliament, and appointed the 
Westminster Assembly of Divines to settle things upon the 
Presbyterian platform, and the Congregationalists petitioned 
for toleration : the Divines of that Assembly replied, that to 
grant their petition would be " licensing perpetual division in 
the Church ;" that it would be " conceding the lawfulness of 
getting new Churches out of true Churches, in countenance of 
which there is not the least example in all the Holy Scrip- 
tures ;" that " if the Church requires that which is evil of any 
member, he must forbear, but without separation ;" and " the 
same ground of separation (scruple of conscience)," say they, 
" may be pleaded by any erroneous conscience whatever, and 



SCHISM. 



243 



thus the Church be broken into as many divisions as there 
are scruples in the minds of men."* Eight nobly argued, 
venerable fathers ! But how have your sons been reasoning 
since 1 " These different denominations," says one, " are but 
regiments, under different colors, of the same great Captain." 
" The different sects," says another, " are but the children of 
one father, each with a different Christian name, but all be- 
longing to the same household of faith." But from the days 
of the Conformists and Nonconformists let us come down to 
the days of the Platformists. The place is New York. 
The scene is the Tabernacle. The occasion is the anniver- 
sary of the New York and American Sunday School Union. 
The Eev. Dr. Ferris presides. The Tabernacle is " thronged 
with interested spectators." Time, the nineteenth century. 
" Pursuing the thought," said Mr. S., " respecting the power 
of our benevolent institutions, he saw in them some fea- 
tures of peculiar excellence that he discovered in no other 
organization. The Christian world is divided into a great 
many sects, and he was ready to say, let the division go 
on, and go on, and perhaps by and by, when the present 
ecclesiastical organizations are dissolved, there may be de- 
vised some new system more conformed than any now exist- 
ing, to the model of the Apostles and the Prophets, Jesus 
Christ himself being the chief corner-stone. There is now no 
Church that may with propriety be called ' the Church,' and 
it might be matter of question, whether it were not a greater 
distinction to belong to one of these benevolent institutions, 
than to any of the so-called churches of the day." O Pres- 
bytery ! Thou wast the Eve in all this sin. Thou wast the 
first to taste the forbidden tree. In sorrow shalt thou bring 

* This answer of the Presbyterians who had just separated from the Church, to 
the Congregationalists who were about to separate from them, reminds us of the 
Bengalee tiger-hunter : "Tiger hunting," said the man, " is a very tine amusement 
so long as we hunt the tiger ; but it becomes rather awkward when the tiger takes 
it into his head to hunt us." 



244 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



forth thy brood all the days of thy life ! In vain dost thou 
deplore the continual splitting ; 

" Like one who stems a stream with sand, 
Or fetters flame with a flaxen band." 

Where is there a principle of cohesion — a centre of unity % 
Each man is a centre, if he can find seven women to hang 
upon his skirts. You have no excommunication that camiot be 
reciprocated on the very principles on which you would is- 
sue yours. You cannot cast up to these sects that they were 
born to-day, for they will cast it back to you that you were 
born but yesterday. There is in your system a facility for 
schism — a premium upon schism. In the Church, an Ignatius 
may be thrown to the wild beasts for his faith, a Poly carp 
may give his aged limbs to the fire : but they leave no follow- 
ers to bear their name ; the Church made them what they 
were; to the Church they leave what they have. A holy 
archbishop may lay his head upon the block, but there are no 
Laudists to tell the story ; a Cranmer may go up in a chariot 
of fire into heaven, but there are no Cranmerites to trumpet 
his fame. In the Church, in all ages, individuality is surren- 
dered, as the Christian sacrifice to Catholicity and unity. 
Calvin and Luther, and Wesley and Arminius, and a multi- 
tude of others, who died in their beds, enjoy the sweet flat- 
tery that thousands are called by their names ; and so was it 
with Arius and Sabellius, and a multitude more, and with Nic- 
olas, the founder of the Nicolaitanes under the very eyes of St. 
John : but in the Church of God " we call no man master ;" 
our Polycarps and Cranmers may die in a blaze of glory, but 
it must all " be done away, by reason of the glory that excel- 
leth." In the Church, not even a Paul may have a follower, 
nor any man in Corinth say, I am of Apollos, or, I am of Cephas. 
But saddest of all it is to see, that the body of Presbyterians 
has ceased to feel any longer the pain of schism ! Majorities 



SCHISM. 



245 



" exscind," minorities " secede ;" " any three ministers," says 
Doctor Breckinridge, " may form a Presbytery schism is 
accomplished, especially after periods of agitation and revival, 
even with sensations of pleasure ; just as a state of high in- 
flammatory action in the body, is sometimes followed by a 
condition in which amputation is unaccompanied by pain. 
But in the vigorous and healthy condition of the Church, — 
" the true body of Christ," partaking the life and unity of 
her Head, — the very thought of division, the very idea of the 
knife, causes the cold chill to pass through every fibre of her 
frame. You may wonder often that she does not consent to 
be split and rent ; you must not wonder ; she is a Living 
Body. 

And you must not wonder that Her children will not con- 
sent to see her, like Agag, hewn in pieces ; for she is their 
Mother. She is " the Lamb's wife," saith St. John, " the Mo- 
ther of us all," saith St. Paul ; " and he hath not God for his 
Father, who hath not the Church for his Mother," was the 
maxim of the earliest antiquity. The schismatic can there- 
fore be known by this, that he has little compunction in rend- 
ing, or in seeing others rend, the Church which is Christ's 
body. As the pretended mother, in the presence of Solomon, 
was willing to see the child divided between the real Mother 
and herself ; but the true Mother threw herself frantic be- 
tween the child and the knife, and cried, " No, do not divide 
it, let the other take it, rather than 'divide it:" so says the 
Catholic heart, " O, it is our Mother, do not divide our Mo- 
ther !" But the schismatic says, " Yes, divide, and distribute 
her amongst us all." 

O God! I cried, why have I been left motherless upon 
the earth 1 Why have not our fathers risen from the dead to 
tell us that never, never would they have begun the schism, 
if they had seen the things that we see, or had heard the 
things that we hear 1 ? Why do not the graves of Geneva 

31* 



246 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



and Wirtemberg open, and Luther and Calvin, and Melanc- 
thon and Grotius break the silence of the dust % If I have 
reason to believe that my British forefathers would not have 
perpetrated schism, had they foreseen its consequences, and 
that they did not even intend to perpetrate it, as it was : how 
shall I answer in the Judgment if I perpetuate it now, with 
these frightful results before my eyes, and aid in its expansion, 
and help to plant this upas tree of Christendom on heathen 
shores? If to me is now given the-opportunity which Me- 
lancthon at the beginning, and Grotius afterward, and even 
Calvin himself, and a multitude of the continental reformers, 
so much desired, of recovering the Episcopacy, and with it 
the Unity : am I not free — am I not bound to embrace it % 
The days were evil, and the times violent, in which my an- 
cestral branch was broken off from the ancient olive-tree. I 
must not condemn them for motives of which I cannot per- 
haps judge at this distance of time. But from their sturdy 
answer to the Congregationalists, I know that they never, 
never, never dreamed of the endless schisms of which they 
were unconsciously sowing the seeds. Which of them, in the 
most incoherent dream of night, would ever have imagined 
that his son, bewildered in innumerable isms and schisms, 
should in a few years find cause "in a Sunday School 
XJniorC to say — "It may be a question, whether it be 
not a greater distinction to belong to one of these benevolent 
institutions, than to any of the so-called churches of the 
day!" 

Am I influenced, said I, in remaining out of the Church, by 
the considerations that tempted my fathers to leave it % If 
with the Puritans her Episcopacy was to be " the stirrup for 
Antichrist to get into the saddle," has not Presbyterianism 
already been the ladder, by which Genevan, German, English- 
man, New Englander, and whole communities, have glided 
down into Socinianism ? Is not her Prayer-Book so unex- 



SCHISM. 



247 



ceptionably beautiful and excellent, that, in the calmer times 
which have succeeded, a distinguished dissenting divine, with- 
out fear of forfeiting his reputation, either for correct taste, 
scholarship, or piety, may say : " Next to the Bible, it is the 
book of my understanding and my heart V Is her language 
on the sacraments any higher-toned than that of the West- 
minster Confession % And have not many of the things for 
which my fathers separated from the Church, been gradually 
re-adopted by the Puritans themselves % Expensive churches 
— the mystic emblems of the Gothic style — the massive 
tower and pointed steeple — the "dim religious light" and 
dark-vaulted roof — the solemn chant, once hooted as the " In- 
dian pow-wow" — flowing gowns and deep-toned organs, called 
by the Puritans " the devil's bagpipe" — praying at funerals, 
which was once abolished — the Lord's Prayer and the Dox- 
ology, which were pronounced by the Scots to be " a super- 
stition" — kneeling in the time of prayer, once not customary 
even in family devotions — and written sermons, formerly the 
detestation of the faithful — have they not all been re-adopted 
by the Presbyterians 1 What have I to do then with these 
childish " scruples" that drove my fathers from the Church ? 
What have I to do with the political influences that tempted 
them to schism ? If they had to choose, as I have to do, be- 
tween the old Church yet abiding in her strength, and the 
Presbyterianism now overtaken in all lands by a deep and 
mortal decay, would they ever have left the fair bosom of 
the Church of England ? Would they have left a Church 
which had weathered storms that Frankfort and Geneva never 
knew, which had just beaten back the Spanish Armada that 
came against her by water, and the legions of Queen Mary 
that came against her by fire, and had walked unharmed over 
the black vaults of the Gunpowder Plot, and which, with 
Germany and Geneva submerged in infidelity, is left, the 
only lighthouse of the sea, confessedly " the bulwark of the 



248 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



Eeformation ?" No ! Luther, like his descendants, would 
have perferred Popery to Pantheism; Calvin, as many a 
Genevese has lately done, would have abhorred the religion 
of Servetus, and fallen back upon the Papacy ; and I have 
charity enough to think that Cromwell himself would have 
remained in the Church for which Charles died, and at 
whose altars one of his descendants now ministers ; that 
even Cotton Mather would have continued in the Church, 
to which his descendant and namesake has lately fled from 
New Englandism ; and that Wesley would have so shaped 
his course, as to have made unnecessary his avowal that he 
lived and died a member of the Church of England. They 
all left the Church for reasons they would not now approve. 
They left it to entail evils they did not then foresee ! 

Now a theory is true, when it will account for and har- 
monize all the facts and phenomena of the case. If, then, the 
Church of which we speak be the Church of Christ, and if 
separation from it be the sin contemplated in the Scriptures 
under that name, and if the ancient faith be confided to the 
Church, so that, in her keeping, the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it : then the present condition of the schismatical 
communions is identically that which we should have some 
day looked for, in the displeasure and blight of Providence. 
The great phenomenon can in no other way that I see be ac- 
counted for. We live in a world where God has blended and 
combined the visible with the invisible — the body with the 
soul — the letter with the spirit — the sacrament with the 
grace — the Church with the Faith. If this be so, sectarism 
and the Faith can never exist long together. You despise the 
pot, and carry off as you suppose the hidden manna ; but for 
want of the ark, in which, like Aaron, to lay it up, your 
manna becomes corrupt, and your generations cannot " see 
that bread" on which your fathers were fed. When you first 
leave the Church, you take with you a portion of her 



SCHISM. 



249 



jewels of silver and her jewels of gold, but in the German 
and Genevan workshop you soon convert them into a golden 
calf. Where there is schism, you cannot keep the faith. 
You have cut a limb from a tree, and its hidden life will de- 
part. You despise and break the vessel, and profess to care 
only for the oil and the light ; but you, by-and-by, return 
and cry, " Give us of your oil, for the winds are high, and our 
lamps are gone out." If you sever a limb from the human 
body, the limb for a while may exhibit signs of life, but the 
convulsive action will soon subside. Schism is like the buck- 
ets of the daughters of Danae ; you may with great toil be 
continually pouring in ; but it will be as constantly escaping. 
Only the unrent Church without effort can retain it. 

There is then, said I, a Church yet on earth. As the sick 
may die amidst the nursings of a hospital, or may sometimes 
meet with mercy and health upon the street : so many may 
perish in the Church, and " children of the kingdom be cast 
out," and many not in it may be saved, for " they shall come 
from the east and from the west, and from the north and from 
the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God." Esau 
may sell his birthright ; a daughter of Canaan may find 
crumbs under the table. But yet there is a Church. It is 
builded on a rock. It has possession of the keys. It is the 
elect Lady. It is the heir of the promise. It is rich with pro- 
visions and facilities for our salvation. It tells us what was 
the Bible of the early Christians ; it tells us what was their 
faith and discipline. The intention of its Founder was to 
help men on in virtue and a holy life, by Baptism and the 
succeeding confirmations and teachings of a holy Mother ; by 
filling it as His symbol or Shechinah, with His perpetual pres- 
ence ; and, chiefly, by the continual exhibition of the memorials 
of the great Sacrifice for sin : to hedge men's path along from 
the cradle to the skies, to render their salvation as certain as 
the nature of probation will permit. The Church is therefore 



250 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



one, and never can be two. Moses did not establish two 
churches ; the temple did not allow of two priesthoods ; Christ 
did not leave two bodies to perpetuate His presence upon 
earth. If there be two churches, one is the Church of Christ, 
the other a device of man ; " on this rock I build my church ;" 
"unto thee I give the keys of the kingdom." "One body as 
there is one spirit," saith St. Paul, " even as ye are called in 
one hope of your calling." There can be no more two 
Bodies than there can be two Heads. There can be no more 
two churches than there can be two Gods. Man can no more 
make a Church, than he can make a Bible. 

This view of the subject made me still more unhappy. 
Here, said I, I find myself a member of the oldest and first 
sect among the moderns — a sect that had little cause to leave 
a Church fresh and resplendent from the fires of Smithfield 
and of Oxford — the experimenter on the untried sea of schism 
— the great forerunner and lineal parent of all the sects and 
schisms in the land. I feel that the current to which I am 
committed is downward, and is sweeping me on. "What, 
then, is before me, but to make those frightful cataractic 
leaps into the deeper and darker speculations, into which the 
bolder Presbyterians of Europe and New England have 
plunged before me 1 Or, even if I should not myself be 
drawn over the abyss, what may be the fortune of my 
children % 

u O when the grave 

Has swallowed up thy memory and thyself, 
Dost thou desire the bane that poisons earth 
To twine its roots around thy coffin' d clay, 
Spring from thy bones, and blossom on thy tomb, 
That of its fruit thy babes may eat and die I" 

As a Presbyterian layman, I should now have sought 
repose in the Episcopal Church. But as a minister, I had 
motives for adheiiug, while I could, to the validity of my 



SCHISM. 



251 



orders. As I remarked in the early part of this narrative, it 
was a subject I could not be said to have examined. I 
dreaded, too, to be convinced. Sometimes I almost deter- 
mined that I would shut my eyes. I saw the fiery trial into 
which it would precipitate me. In every other point of view, 
Episcopacy had now conquered my judgment, and won the 
more cautious admiration and affections of my heart. Be- 
fore, however, I explain the manner in which I was compelled 
to yield this scruple, some may be curious to know the fur- 
ther operations of a bewildered mind, admiring unity as a 
thing beautiful, loving it as a thing most excellent, deploring 
its loss as the greatest calamity since the expulsion out of 
Eden, and longing for its restoration as the promised har- 
binger of the world's regeneration. And if the reader be 
somewhat weary of the detention, let him remember the 
significant re-iteration with which a mother in Israel sang — 
" For the divisions of Reuben there were great thoughts of 
heart .... Eor the divisions of Reuben there were great 
searchings of heart." 



CHAPTER XIII. 



A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



As I looked with dismay and sorrow on the membra dis- 
jecta of Presbyterianism, lying around me in wild disorder, 
like the broken columns of some tower, rent and scattered by 
the bolts of an angry sky ; and particularly as I gazed on the 
torn and withering limbs of the venerable tree under which 
my fathers worshipped two centuries ago, now riven and 
strown over the land, as by the visitation of some mighty 
wind from heaven : if the question had been put to me, " Can 
these broken columns rise again into their tower, and can 
these shattered branches be gathered again into their an- 
cient tree V I must have answered, with the prophet over the 
bones of the valley, " O Lord God, thou knowest !" Still, I 
believed that a day was yet to come when there should be a 
noise, and a shaking, and a restoration of the branches to their 
tree. Not a pulse of my heart ever beat in sympathy with 
those now numerous Presbyterians, who regard it as a matter 
of gratulation, rather than of regret, that such differences ex- 
ist in the Christian world. I could never have been brought to 
think that it was either the intention or the proper result of 
Christianity, so to alienate and sunder the members of the 
body. I held it to be a libel on the dignity of our religion 
that, without a centre — a mouth-piece — a church, to regulate 
such matters, it should be so vastly accommodating as ever 



A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



253 



and anon to change its hues with the different varieties of 
mind on which it might happen to alight, like the chameleon, 
assuming the various complexion of the objects over which it 
passes. These varying forms and creeds, which to the eyes 
of many of my brethren were like the variegated plumes and 
banners of the different regiments' of an army moving to- 
gether under One Great Captain : were to me like the hectic 
hues of autumn, the result, not of vigor, but of decay ; the 
harbinger, not of a mellow sunshine ripening the fields into a 
golden harvest, but of a cheerless winter arresting the circu- 
lation of nature, and killing the life of all that is green upon 
earth. And there was a time, as we have seen, when the 
Presbyterians themselves made noble answer to the Congre- 
gationalists, when the latter offered the plea of conscience as 
a plea for schism. They never undervalued unity, nor spoke 
of it in so sour a tone, until unity, like the vine, binding its 
grapes joyfully together in its branches, grew up beyond their 
reach : just as Melancthon, and Calvin, and Grotius, and Le 
Clerc, and the Synod of Dort, entertained a veneration for 
the ancient Episcopacy; and their children never thought 
slight of it until they perceived that it was irrecoverably 
gone, and that they must cast about them for a new foun- 
dation. 

I know the " philosophical" objections to the resurrection 
of the flesh : How can the elements that now compose this 
body, when drifted and driven in a thousand combinations 
through the world, be brought back, and restored to the unity 
and identity in which they now exist 1 And I know the ob- 
jection to the restoration of Unity in the Body of Christ : 
How can the elements of thought, drifting and driving wildly 
in a thousand combinations through the world, be recovered 
and remoulded into the beauty and harmony of One Body, 
feeling the same life, thinking the same thought, moving with 
the same will, and happy in the same affection 1 But why 

22 



254 



LOOKING FOE. THE CHURCH. 



should it be thought a tiling incredible with us that God 
should restore us Unity % Like the resurrection, it may be 
the great miracle in reserve, the crowning beauty of the full- 
ness of the times of grace. Whether the elements that go to 
form the body do or do not acquire a mysterious affinity for 
each other that shall one day re-unite them : it is certain that 
the members of the Body of Christ have an affinity and fond- 
ness, and will draw together, so soon as " that which letteth" 
— the force that keeps them so unnaturally apart, be it the 
pride of private judgment, or be it the dark influence of Evil 
hovering over for a time — " shall be taken out of the way." 
The power of God is equal to His goodness. His goodness 
has promised it ; His power shall perform it. " And there 
shall be one fold, and one Shepherd." 

But, as we believe in the resurrection of the body, chiefly 
because Christ is risen from the dead and become the first- 
fruits of them that slept : so, while yet a Presbyterian, I 
believed in the future unity of the Church, because the Church, 
in the time of her first-fruits, had long ago been visibly one 
upon earth. I had but to look through the dust of recent 
creeds, and beyond the ruins and fragments of sectarianism 
piled around me, back to a period of glorious memory, when 
the smallest beginning of " I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, 
and I of Cephas, and I of Christ," was arrested by the burn- 
ing admonition, "Is Christ divided?" Yes, there was a time 
when Asiatic, European, African, and Islander, the white 
man, the red man, and the negro, Greek and Barbarian, Jew 
and Scythian, the bond and the free, were in one communion 
and brotherhood : and this, too, not in an age friendly, like 
the present, to coalescence and coalition, but presenting for- 
midable barriers of language, country, clime, government, 
education, tastes, and manners, and a thousand influences, 
social and political, to keep the Christians in the different 
nations irreconcilably apart. I had but to look back to hap- 



A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



255 



pier days, when the smallest schism was frowned out of the 
pale of Christianity, as unworthy to exist within it ; — the glo- 
rious days, when a question so unimportant as the time of 
keeping Easter, brought holy Bishops out of Asia, over many 
a league of sea and land, to consult their brethren in Europe, 
when, at every step of their way, the sword of persecution 
gleamed in the sun by day, and the fires of the martyrs 
burned on the hills by night ; — all from the heavenly motive 
of producing concert in the time, as well as consent (which 
was universal already) in the fact, of the observance of Eas- 
ter : — glorious days, when such questions, only because they 
might possibly have a remote bearing upon Christian unity, 
were matter of painful and prolonged anxiety throughout the 
Christian Church. How sublime this spectacle ! How per- 
fectly identified with the birth of Christianity, this doctrine of 
visible unity ! Nations just emerging from the isolation, and 
se]fishness, and wars of heathenism, grasping the mighty con- 
ception of universality and unity ! And be it remembered 
that these men who made the journey out of Asia into Italy, 
were born in the days of the Apostles. And was not the 
same spectacle exhibited when dissensions about circumcision, 
and other such matters, arose among the Apostles themselves, 
and Apostles left their flocks in the wilderness, to " go up to 
Jerusalem" and settle, in holy synod, a uniformity of practice 1 
And was it not still the same, three hundred years after, when 
a like question, whether infants should be baptized chiefly or 
exclusively on the eighth day after birth, brought together a 
great council of bishops in Egypt 1 Such was the sublime 
unity of the Church in the first few centuries — the faith set- 
tled — the Apostles' Creed the bond — the Episcopacy the 
symbol of Union — and the Church One ; — nothing in which to 
differ from each other, throughout the body universal, but the 
exact time for commemorating the Lord's resurrection, and 
the precise day for receiving infants to His Baptism : ques- 



256 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



tions absurd to the modern sectarian, but important indeed 
to men who felt that touching Unity was " touching the apple 
of the eye." 

How could I, as a Presbyterian, undervalue unity ? As a 
Presbyterian, let me go back to the fourth century. I here 
find Episcopacy universal on the three continents. Yet so 
wonderful a revolution as the entire overthrow of the apos- 
tolic institution of Presbytery, and the supervening of Epis- 
copacy on its ruins, did not tempt a solitary country, or pro- 
vince, or city, that we hear of, to produce a " schism in the 
body !" What, therefore, said I, did the Presbyterian Church, 
think of Unity then ? Why, evidently, they thought it of such 
paramount importance, that apostolic Presbytery must be uni- 
versally and unresistingly surrendered, rather than retain it in 
any church on earth at the expense of Unity ! They parted with 
Presbytery to purchase Unity : but our modern Presbyterians 
give Unity to the winds, to get back Presbytery ! W x hich horn 
of the dilemma will you choose ? Either it is not true that 
Presbyterianism existed, and was overthrown: or else the 
universal Church was pleased to see every Presbytery on 
earth sunk into the sea, rather than behold celestial charity 
broken in the violation of Unity. The Church of the first 
century, according to your own showing, would not purchase 
tinsel at the price of gold — Presbytery at the expense of 
Unity ! No, none but heretics would perpetrate schism in 
those days; Ebion, Arius, Pelagius, — the daring heretic 
alone ventured out from the Ark upon the wave^ and ex- 
hibited, in those days, the hideous phenomenon of schism. 
And it is to be observed again, that the " heresies," and 
" damnable heresies," spoken of in the New Testament as 
things then future, signify also, in the Greek, " schisms' 1 '' and 
" damnable schisms." And when, after six hundred years of 
Unity, Rome set up her peculiarities, and created breaches, 
by claiming a new authority, and proclaiming new terms of 



A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



257 



communion : all the rest of Christendom declared in an agony 
against the novum et inauditwn nefas, and protested in thunders 
that echoed from the plains of Syria to the mountains of 
Wales. And, after Rome, there was no other schism to be 
noted, until the local individualism that contrived the Creed of 
Trent, contrived in the same century the creeds of Westmin- 
ster, Augsburg, Geneva, Dort, and Heidelberg. If, then, the 
Church was one and undivided for so many centuries, so that 
the universal overthrow of Presbyterianism could not shake 
a single province or city from its adherence to unity : surely 
it is now more likely that the " Christian world," having suf- 
fered the endless mischiefs of sectarianism, may at some fu- 
ture day afford to return to the creed and the order of the 
centuries when all were One. This, then, I took for granted : 
that " the thing that hath been is that which shall be ;" that 
the Church has been One, and the Church may be One once 
more. Nor is it half so likely that the unconverted world 
shall be converted, as that the converted world shall be 
united. There is a window in heaven, which, if opened in 
answer to our earnest prayers, will pour us out an influence 
that shall accomplish both results at once, and shall a second 
time "Baptize us all into One Body." 

Now, in that glorious day when all shall be one again, 
shall the Church be Presbyterian'? For it seemed to me, 
that whatever it was in the past, when the Church was One : 
it is likely to be in the future, when the Church shall be One 
again. And it was my duty to seek the Church that should 
give the fairest promise of harmonizing conflicting opinions, 
of satisfying the purposes of organization, of meeting with the 
concurrent approbation of all who profess and call themselves 
Christians. Shall the Church of the talked-of millennium be 
Anabaptist 1 Shall sacraments, and rites, and priesthood, be 
clone away, and we be all transformed into a universe of 
Quakers? Shall we be Socinians'? Shall all mankind be 

22* 



253 



LOOKUPS FOR THE CHUECH. 



Mormons l The answer to all such questions will be found 
in the answer to another : — Shall the Church, in that glorious 
future be Presbyterian? Or am I upholding an impracticable 
theory, that is to give place to one that eometh after it. and 
is to be preferred before it. because it was before it ? This is 
a question entirely of order and of faith. 

As to the former, it occurred to me with great force, that 
the Presbyterian may become Episcopalian or Catholic, with- 
out the sacrifice of principle. The conditions of his own 
ecclesiastical existence oblige him to admit, that the Episco 
pal Church is a Church of Christ ; that her ministry is a valid 
rrdnistry ; that her sacraments are valid and lawful sacra- 
ments ; that, in entering her communion, he will still be in 
the Church of Christ ; and that every Presbyterian on earth 
might return to her bosom to-morrow, without the slightest 
misgiving as to the validity of her ordination, sacraments, and 
discipline. 

If it be said, that for a Presbyterian minister to submit to 
Episcopal ordination, would be to recognise re-ordination : I 
answer, that Presbyterians have never held ordination to be 
of so sacramental a character, that they should shrink from 
its repetition for the sake of a thing so holy as unity and 
brotherhood. It is known that the Genevan Church has, in 
several instances, laid hands on clergymen of the Church of En- 
gland removing to Geneva ; regarding this their act as of the 
nature, perhaps, of a local commission, such as it is pretended 
that Barnabas and Paul received at Antioeh, to exercise their 
ministry in the locality - and sphere to which they had conie. 
There have been instances even in New England, where this 
species of ordination has been, in other clays, conferred on 
ministers of the Church of England. And although this is 
not a valid vindication of Episcopacy, in imparting her orders 
to ministers returning to her bosom from other denomina- 
tions : yet it has more than the force of the argument ad horn- 



A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



259 



inem, because it takes the objection out of the mouth of the 
objector, by showing that Presbytery has really no conception 
of the matter that would render re-ordination itself either sac- 
rilegious or sinful. But the whole reasoning, I admit, is in- 
tended to provide for an extreme case, — a case not likely to 
exist, — of a scruple based upon principle, against the repeti- 
tion of a sacramental ordination ; and the only inference we 
wish to draw from this mode of reasoning is, that the cause 
must be admitted to be good, which can cover apparent ex- 
ceptions and actual extremes. For the sake then of Unity, 
the lost but priceless pearl of Christendom, I could see that 
the Presbyterians, and even the Presbyterian clergymen of the 
most straitest sect, might return to the bosom of the Church 
from which they went out, without the surrender of principle, 
and without a scruple of suspicion as to the validity of her 
ministerial functions ; especially since the late controversy in 
New York, and the late numbers of the Princeton Review, 
have made it clear that the last stronghold of Old School 
Presbyterianism has surrendered to the Congregationalists, 
and that the sacramental character of ministerial ordination, 
through a line of ordainers reaching back to the Apostles, is 
for ever abandoned. And it is well ! It will make the way 
the easier for your ministers and laity to come back into the 
Church. "When your laity get to understand, that every five 
or seven good men may come together, form a congregation, 
and ordain one of their members as their minister ; and that 
this ordination will be as valid as if the whole company of the 
Apostles had laid their hands upon his head ; and when your 
clergy get to understand that this is all the inherent virtue, 
grace, or charm of ordination : they will find it all the easier to 
give up so cheap a luxury, and to return into the Church. 
The Church owes something certainly to Dr. Potts. His rea- 
sonings, and his cheapening the ministry, have already driven, 
at least three clergymen, that I have heard of, into the Epis- 



260 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



copal Church. The Church will owe something also, we are 
certain, to the gentlemen of the Princeton Review, to which 
we look for similar results. " The authority to call the minis- 
try is primarily in the whole Church. . . . The power be- 
longs in all its vigor to the people ; and they can originate as 
valid a ministry as ever was made by Presbytery or Prelate."* 
Surely, after this, Presbyterians may return to the Church 
from which their fathers went out ; and their ministers will 
be sure, in their sober second thought, to come back to Her 
for an unction that speaketh better things of their order 
and their honor, than the Princeton Review. 

On the other hand, as to Churchmen surrendering Episco- 
pacy, possibly some few might do it without the surrender 
of principle ; but, almost universally, they feel a living con- 
fidence that in the Episcopacy are involved the preservation 
of the faith, the perpetuity of the ministry, the purity of the 
sacraments, the existence of the Church, and the hereditary 
title to the promises of Christ. A fundamental principle 
would be at once surrendered, and the heart would never 
know a moment's ease. They could not feel that they were 
in the old Church that had been from the beginning. But 
Presbyterians could recross the barrier which only their own 
hands have erected, and come back to the ancient Church, and 
still be sure that they were " God's husbandry," that they 
were " God's building." A.nd the giving up mere personal 
feeling for the sake of doing all in your power to arrive at 
universal unity, would be " an odor of a sweet smell, a sac- 
rifice acceptable, well pleasing to God ;" and even the slight 
error would be forgiven, — if perchance it were an error, — ven- 
tured for the sake of binding the bleeding members of His 
Body upon earth together. Even parties in politics make con- 
cession for less noble ends ; and there is a charm in the 
watchword, " Union for the sake of the Union." 

* Princeton Review, 1844. 



A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



261 



Then there was another question : — Does the faith that I 
have received from those before me and around me, hold out 
to me the hope that it shall be universal 1 Is it likely that 
the Westminster Confession of Faith shall be the faith of all 
the earth 1 ? Is it not too intellectual, too metaphysical, too 
extensive in its area 1 Is there not too much said in it, and 
said too positively, of the deep things of predestination, free 
will, foreknowledge, decrees, reprobation, personal election 
of angels, men, and infants, limited redemption, effectual 
calling, perseverance in grace? Be all this so — be these 
the secret pillars of God's everlasting throne, the hidden 
springs by which he moves the universe — whether they be 
or not, is not now the question : but, Are these points, which 
are so delicate and full of difficulty, and so unfathomably 
deep, requiring the highest metaphysical acumen either to - 
believe or to defend them, are they of such absolute necessity, 
that they must be embodied and propounded to the human 
race as the symbol of the Christian faith % Is it likely, or even 
possible, that the whole world, " from the least to the great- 
est," shall reach the conclusions of the Westminster Assem- 
bly % The very question provokes despair ! Calvinism can 
nowhere retain the ground that it has gained ; much less can 
it make new advances, or add new territories permanently to its 
domain. It is said to be a fact that, while the population of 
New England has steadily increased, and has been doubled 
and quadrupled, the number of members of the Calvinistic 
congregations, diluted as that Calvinism is, is not greater now 
than it was a century ago : while innumerable isms have pre-, 
pared her distracted communities to become, either a blind 
prey to the meshes of Popery, or an enlightened acquisition 
to a more ancient and Catholic Episcopacy. 

In the now distracted condition of " those who profess and 
call themselves Christians," we need a creed for binding us 
together, that shall be infinitely simple. And what can we 



26*2 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



find, or what could we invent, that shall be more simple than 
the xlpostles' Creed, the identical creed of the ancient Catho- 
lic and the present Episcopal Church ? The mistake both of 
Rome and Geneva has consisted in prying into those things 
which are not convenient ; binding the understandings of men 
with systems too minutely detailed, too tightly drawn, too 
metaphysically nice, and by consequence too difficult for uni- 
versal agreement. The creeds of both are too large, too 
positive upon points never heard of in the Church's creeds 
before ; and both are daring accumulations on the Ancient 
Faith : and to look at either — Trent or Westminster — one 
would feel safe in fearing a priori, that wherever they were 
imposed, wen-informed minds would throw them off, and seek 
continually for a change ; and that as creeds they never could 
be universally accepted. It is carrying legislation too far. 
It is despotism. Mind cannot brook it. Man will not bear it. 
Geneva was uneasy under the yoke, and broke it from her 
neck. Rome is uneasy too, and is breaking it from hers. 
Holland, Germany, New England, have done the same. But 
in England, and wherever Episcopacy exists, where man and 
mind have been free, the people are contented with the an- 
cient faith, the yoke that is easy, the burden that is light, the 
happy medium between the too much and the too little : a 
faith worthy of the age of inspiration, and worthy the illus- 
trious name it has borne from the beginning, — the Apostles' 
Creed. 

Nor is this merely an a priori apprehension. Look at the 
result. Fortunately for us, time has on both these systems 
made a long and fair experiment. Rome led the way; 
"Westminster followed. Rome, for a thousand years, has 
been urging her never-settled and still accumulating creed 
upon the Christian world. Has she succeeded ? No. Erom 
the utterance of her first dogma, claiming supremacy, to the 
publication of her last, by which the sine labe concepta is 



A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



263 



to be added to the honors of the Blessed Virgin by Pope 
Pius IX., and is to be incorporated as a new article into the 
Creed of Rome : she has been nobly and successfully resisted. 
Sixty millions of Catholics in the East, in communion with 
the sees of Constantinople and Jerusalem, disdained her preten- 
sions from the very first, as they do still ; while in the West, 
England, and even France, and Portugal, and Spain, contested, 
and still, to an important extent, contest, the encroachments ; 
while millions of her followers are either ignorant of her real 
faith, or they hold it in Convenient senses of their own, with- 
out any fear before their eyes of a whole universe of cardinals 
and popes. Borne has made her experiment. Intellectually — 
or so long as man shall reason, and morally — or so long as 
man shall enjoy the lights and rights of conscience, and re- 
ligiously — or so long as men shall have the Holy Scriptures 
in their hands, it is impossible that all mankind shall em- 
brace the tedious details of Romanism. 

Equally marked have been the fate and the failure of Pres- 
bytery. Three hundred years it has run on, and the winds 
and the tides have been with it. Yet it has not achieved the 
destiny which its framers intended. It is farther from the 
goal than the day it entered, amidst the shouts of Geneva and 
Germany, upon its course. Its creed, like that of Rome, has 
required continual patching and refitting ; and with every new 
piece inserted in the garment, the new hath taken from the 
old, and the rent hath been made worse. I am probably 
quite within the proper estimate in supposing that in the 
Presbyterian sects there are at this moment thirty millions 
of Unitarians, Universalists, and Pantheists, and that from 
fifty to one hundred millions who have received its Baptism 
have gone into eternity " denying the Lord that bought them 
with His blood." And, N even in the last stronghold of Old 
School Presbyterianism perhaps, the man cannot be produced 
who would subscribe the " Confession of Faith" in the bold 



264: 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



and manly sense intended by its framers. The whole body 
is in its opinions dismembered, and is dismayed at the results 
of its own experiment. There is not left in Europe, and per- 
haps scarcely here, a solid nucleus to the vaporous body ; but 
in its eccentric orbit, whirling alternately through the extremes 
of heat and cold, it loses by evaporation in the high temper- 
ature of its revivals, and still further by contraction, as it 
passes next into the freezing aphelion of intellectual specula- 
tions. The denomination, which three hundred years ago was 
one, and which, from having been nursed in the Church, had 
caught the Church's accent, and answered the Congregational 
schismatics as a Church should do that stood as a giant oak 
which nothing but omnipotence itself could blight : we now be- 
hold rent and scattered, like the leaves of the oak in winter. 
She now presents no point of unity to her scattered and de- 
jected members; much less, in the ears of the world without, 
can she raise among her legions the rallying watchword — We 
are one.* 

* John Angell James may be regarded as a representative of Sectarism in 
England, and from an address of his, delivered last year before the " Evangelical 
Alliance," or " the friends of Christian Union," in Edinburgh, I make the following 
extracts : — 

L K It will be asked, what kind of Union it is that we are seeking and endeavor- 
ing to form ; and to this question we reply, it is not an amalgamation of the differ- 
ent relisrious bodies, though even of this we need not quite despair, after what has 
lately taken place in Scotland — that land of secession and disruption, as it seems to 
be—in the coalition of two separate bodies of professing Christians." 

Sectarianism, then, is incurable ! The religious bodies are not to be amalgamated ! 
But one might have supposed that at such a meeting, and for such a purpose, and in 
Scotland too, a Congregationalist would have passed by the opportunity of such a 
thrust at Presbyterian Scotland — " that land of secession and disruption, as it seems 
to be ."' « 

The speaker proceeds — 

2. "Much less is it the object of the Evangelical Alliance to create the real and 
essential unity of the Church of Christ ; that has been arranged in the councils of 
Eternity. The will of man can neither make nor unmake this. We are, and must 
be. members one of another, even in spite of ourselves. There is but one Church ; 
there can be but one. Wrangle as we will, we cannot wrangle away from each 
other. We cannot tear ourselves from each other, but by tearing ourselves from 
Jesus Christ, and, blessed be God, there is a power which will prevent this." 

Calvinism cannot be kept out even from a ' ; Christian Union !" " Arranged in the 
councils of eternity !" u We cannot tear ourselves from each other but by tearing 



A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



265 



Thus have the results more than made good the bodings of 
the thoughtful and far-reaching minds of other days. Papist 
and Presbyterian have gone too far. Both have carried out 

ourselves from Christ, and, blessed be God, there is a power which will prevent 
this." So, " wrangle as we will, we cannot wrangle away from each other." Is 
this the invisible Church, and the spiritual unity, or unity in spirit, that we hear 
of? Does it satisfy the longing heart ? No, no ; hear the same speaker again : — 

3. " Our object, then, is not to create essential unity, but to manifest it — to make 
our union visible to the world. And what consistent Christian must not desire 
this ? Who can look without deep concern upon the present state of the Christian 
Church, agitated by controversy, torn by faction, and rent by schism ? Who can 
witness without grief her broken unity, her tarnished beauty, her shattered frame, 
her wasted energy V Who ought not to unite in repairing all this, to rescue Chris- 
tianity from the taunt of the infidel, and Protestantism from the boasted triumph of 
the Papist ?" 

So spiritual unity is after all unsatisfactory. It must be made " manifest" and 
"visible" and " Christianity rescued from the taunts of infidels.' 1 '' Mr. James is a 
sanguine man ; but is he sanguine on this topic ? Let him speak once more for 
himself. 

" My reverend brother has cautioned us against idolizing our organization as an 
Evangelical Alliance. The warning is seasonable and salutary. We are not so to 
identify the cause of Christian union with this attempt to promote it, as to suppose 
that the former could not exist without the latter. This may not be God's method of 
bringing about the great object we have in view. He may not so far honor us as 
to accept our plan ; still the cause will not ultimately fail. Another and a happier 
generation profiting by our mistakes, yet stimulated by our example, will take up 
again the subject, and do more and better than we have done," &c. 

Yes, Mr. James, now you are right ; it " may not be God's method of bringing 
about the great object you have in view." You can only know what that method is, 
by what you call " another and a happier generation," not however in the future, 
as you suppose, but in the past, when " they that believed were all of one mind ;" 
not " profiting by your mistakes," as you express it, for they were the days of John, 
and Polycarp, and Irenaeus, who never fell into such mistakes at all. But we are 
glad to see this Evangelical Alliance, albeit a sad ignis fatuus, that serves to 
pacify with an illusory hope, and to keep schism breathing a little longer. Secta- 
rianism is got to be so intolerable to yourselves, that unless you can keep up some 
such hope, your people will be constantly returning to the unity of the Church 
which they have left behind. 

But this Evangelical Alliance has given us some valuable hints of the spirit in 
which its advocates hifve gone about their work. The Rev. Dr. Patten, a Presby- 
terian divine of New York, crossed the broad sea to make, at one of its meetings, 
the following speech :— 

" Some seem to be afraid that we are going by this Alliance to blow up the 
Church of England. If by blowing up the Church of England they mean that we 
are going to blow it into a great bubble or bladder, why, that is already done. But 
if they mean that we are going to blow it up s%-high, why, then we confess that 
we do expect to put that Church a little nearer heaven than it ever was before." 

Strike on ! The Church is the anvil, said a holy father, that hath worn out many 
a hammer. 

23 



266 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



too far the doctrine of development. Both have prescribed 
too much to be believed. Both have indulged too far in min- 
gling philosophy with faith. Both have filled the continent of 
Europe with a skepticism that is but the natural goal of the 
human mind, when cut adrift from some dark dogma, abhor- 
rent to reason, and incompatible with the nature of God. 
Both seem to have nearly run their course. Both have failed, 
after a fair experiment, to make any approach toward concil- 
iation of parties and the restoration of Unity. And unless 
we can find some Witness sitting by, the while, in sackcloth, 
and preserving, as on a table of stone, the faith of the first 
ages : we must give up the heritage of God to the demon of 
discord and misrule, and mark the prayer of Him whom the 
Father heareth always, as the unanswered prayer ; and His 
promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against His 
Church, as the unaccomplished promise. Forlorn is the hope 
that Presbytery offers, and dark is the alternative held out by 
Popery ; for from them both we can gather but the one idea — 

that Of A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



A UNITY POSSIBLE. 



Still I sighed for unity. And I could sometimes see the 
bosom of my brethren swelling with the same emotion. A 
deep-seated conscience will cling to an idol that hath horns 
and hoofs, rather than be driven from its dim ideas of a God 
and of His worship. The inborn love of immortality, in the 
absence of the true idea, will picture its elysiums and its sen- 
sual harems sooner than quench the spark that thus flies up- 
ward from the heart. The heaven-born aspiration after Unity 
may be excused for seeking, in like manner, in the absence of 
the holy reality, to make up its loss by Articles, Associations, 
Alliances, Societies, Anniversaries, and Platforms, covering 
up with gauze the ugly disagreements of a hundred schisms ; — 
the hearts of all parties appearing to warm and melt toward 
each other on a certain day in the year, as the blood of Saint 
Januarius is said to warm and liquefy in the vial before the 
eyes of the believers in Naples, as often as the martyr's anni- 
versary returns. But it is no more like the beauty of Unity, 
than the ugly caricature which children draw of shadows on the 
wall is like the human face divine. As Frederick the F*irst is 
said to have amused himself, during fits of the gout, in paint- 
ing likenesses of his grenadiers ; and if the picture did not 
happen to resemble the grenadier, Frederick painted the gren- 
adier to the colors of the picture : so the sects, unable to pre- 



268 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



sent the world with a portrait of Unity, " that the world may 
believe," first disfigure the idea of Unity, and then paint 
over the face of schism, with its rents and scars more numer- 
ous than grenadier of a hundred fights could count, and ask 
the world to behold and admire the likeness ! No, no ; a tem- 
perance society, or tract society, was not the Unity for which 
my heart was breaking ! I could see under the platform that 
there was a vacancy and hollowness ; and the shout of an an- 
niversary could not cause me to forget that it was a truce, and 
not a peace ; a farce, and not a fact.* And as these got-up 
substitutes do not fill the heart, the resolution of Unity into 
an ethereal, invisible, spiritual, vaporous feeling, only serves 
to tantalize : like dissolving views under the combined agen- 
cies of magic lanterns, which amuse for the hour and pass 
away for ever. The invention is the invention of a camera 
obscura, and is resorted to only where the lights are extin- 
guished, and the soul is dark. 

* "Now, noble dame, perchance you ask, 
How these two hostile armies met, 
Deeming it were no easy task 
To keep the truce which here was set, 
Where martial spirits all on fire, 
Breathed only blood and mortal ire. 
By mutual inroads, mutual blows, 
By habit and by conscience foes, 
They met on Teviot's strand ; 
They met, and sate them mingled down, 
Without a threat, without a frown, 
As brothers meet in foreign land. 
The hands, the spear that lately grasped, 
Still in the mailed gauntlet clasped, 
Were interchanged in greetings dear. 
Yet be it known, 
Had bugles blown, 
Or signs of war been seen, 
Those bands so fair together ranged, 
Had dyed with gore the green. 
'Twixt truce and war such sudden change 
Was not unfrequent, nor deemed strange 
In the old Border-day." 

Lay of the Last Minstrel. 



A UNITY POSSIBLE. 



269 



I confess that on this great subject my soul was dark. For 
years of my Presbyterian ministry, like many of my brethren, 
I would have nothing to do with anniversaries and platforms. 
Are you opposed to these societies ? Why do we never see 
you on the platform 1 or hear you among the speakers 1 or 
find you preaching in their cause ? — were questions that gave 
me pain for years. I could not bear to tread over the hollow 
sepulchre that a platform covered ; — beautiful without, but full 
within of hypocrisy and strife. I avoided the unions, because 
I contended for Unity. To me all this was like throwing so 
much dust into the ocean, to restore the Atlantis that may 
once have bound the continents together. The Atlantis of the 
ancients is gone ! And until it be restored, the floating sea- 
weed will not tempt prudent men to tread upon the treach- 
erous flooring. 

I panted for a Unity — real, manly, visible, efficient — a 
unity that the world might see ; in order, as the Mediator 
prays, " that the world might believe." I asked the watch- 
men that went about the city : " Can you tell me where unity 
dwelleth % and which is the way to the house thereof? Rome 
saith, It is not with me ; and Geneva saith,' It is not with me. 
Is it then hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from 
the fowls of the air V This I could not believe ; for the idea 
of Unity shadowed on my heart, like that of God and Im- 
mortality and Heaven, must be referable to a substance or 
reality somewhere to be found : and Scripture and Antiquity 
said, We have heard the fame thereof with our ears. "O 
God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have de- 
clared unto us, the noble works that thou didst in their days, 
and in the old time before them." In the times of old, the 
Church was One ; her creed was One ; her government was 
One. We have seen who violated this unity : first Rome, then 
Geneva. But who has preserved the deposit intact 1 Is there 
anywhere a Church, still clinging to the creed and the discipline 

23* 



270 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



of those happy times, and beckoning the world back to unity 
again? O thou Guide of the wandering, show me the way ! 

Now Presbyterians, and even ingenuous Romanists, admit 
that the orders and sacraments of the Episcopal Church are at 
least so far valid as to be of themselves no barrier to Unity. 
If Pius the Ninth were of the same disposition with Pius the 
Fifth, he would acknowledge that Church to-morrow, with her 
creeds, her liturgies, her ministry, and her sacraments, as 
they are : provided only that she would bow her neck to his 
supremacy. Yet Romanism and Presbyterianism are agreed 
in getting rid of the restraints of the Episcopacy : the former, 
by the usurpation of the Popes ; the latter, by the usurpation 
of the Presbyters. Both agree in nullifying the Episcopacy, 
while both concede the validity of its functions. Both ac- 
knowledge the creed of the Episcopal Church, while both have 
as singularly added the local adjudications of Trent and 
Westminster. 

What is the creed of the Episcopal Church ? "I believe 
in God, the Father Almighty," &c. It may all be written in 
less than twenty such lines as are now passing under the 
reader's eyes. It is called, and has been called from the be 
ginning, " The Apostles' Creed." There are reasons to think 
that it came from the Apostles' hands. It bears internal evi- 
dence that its framers were under a restraint of inspiration. 
It can hardly be imagined as within the range of possibility, 
that uninspired men should have been content with making 
such a creed as that. It can scarcely be conceived that the 
Apostles, while the New Testament was not yet written, would 
have left their converts in all lands without a summary or 
outline of their faith. Besides, the earliest fathers ascribe it 
to the Apostles. And wherever the Apostles or their helpers 
travelled, from Syria in the East, to England in the West, 
and away in Africa itself, this creed was known as the faith 
transmitted from the Apostles "/rom the beginning.'''' It was 



A UNITY POSSIBLE. 



271 



known in Churches where the Bible itself was not known. It 
existed, in fact, more than two centuries before the books of 
the New Testament were collected, examined, and received. 
Irengeus, the companion of Polycarp the disciple of St. John, 
after quoting this creed, declares : " This preaching and this 
faith the Church, scattered throughout the whole world, 
guards as carefully as if she dwelt in one house, believes as 
if she had but one soul, and proclaims, teaches, and perpetu- 
ates, as if she had but one mouth." The fathers that quote 
the New Testament as a collected and acknowledged symbol, 
belong to the fourth and the subsequent centuries ; but the 
fathers that quote the Apostles' Creed belong to the second, 
and were born even in the first. And even then it was spo- 
ken of as the faith that they had been taught in childhood, and 
as the faith from the beginning. The Church hands it down 
to us, and tells us it is the faith dictated by the Apostles ; 
just as it hands us the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke, and 
the Acts of the Apostles, and tells us that, although not written 
by Apostles, they were written under the eyes and dictation 
of Apostles. If we reject one, we may reject all. There was, 
then, a creed in the second century, known as universal, found 
everywhere, recited alike in all subsequent time, in Europe, 
Asia, and Africa, and even in the earliest age spoken of as the 
faith from the beginning ; and it kept the Church at unity, 
through all its storms of fire and of blood, three hundred 
years. Where is the heavenly pearl'? Is it lost or mislaid 
in the archives of the Vatican % Is it so buried under the rub- 
bish of centuries that it cannot be found % No ; there is a 
Church in America and England, on both the continents, and 
in a hundred isles, that can say with Irenseus in the second 
j century, " This preaching and this faith the Church, scattered 
j throughout the whole world, guards as carefully as if she dwelt 
I in one house, believes as if she had but one soul, and pro- 
: claims, teaches, and perpetuates, as if she had but one mouth." 



272 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUECH. 



Again, what is this Church's Creed 1 "I believe in one 
God, the Father Almighty," &c, commonly called the Nicene 
Creed : at most a cautious explanation of the former ; and, in 
fact, nothing more than a publication of the terms in which 
the Articles of the Apostles' Creed had been sometimes stated 
from the beginning. The fathers of the Council of Nice, in 
the year 325, did not attempt, because they did not think 
it either necessary or lawful, to protest against the wide-spread 
heresy of Arius in any terms, or words, or confessions, or 
creeds unknown to the Church from the beginning : but, as a 
mere mouth-piece or witness to a matter of fact, fell back on 
the Apostles' Creed, as explained and held from the beginning 
in the Apostolic Churches. In like manner, the Church of 
England did not deem it necessary or lawful to create new 
Creeds or Confessions of Faith, in order to protest against 
the corruptions of the Papacy : but, true to the spirit of 325, 
fell back on the Creed as then asserted to have been the faith 
from the beginning. Shall I say, then, that it betrays aston- 
ishing ignorance, or shall I more unkindly suspect that it 
proceeds from lack of Christian candor, that Presbyterians 
charge the Church with arrogance in dictating her faith to the 
world % So far is she from this arrogance, that this is the 
only point in which the Church has shown herself timid. She 
never dared to touch the faith of antiquity with one of her fin- 
gers. At Nice, in the year 325, she successfully resisted the 
overflow of the Arian heresy, by simply falling back on what 
was known to have been the faith from the beginning. And, 
twelve hundred years after, she as successfully resisted Rome, 
not by making confessions and creeds never heard of in the 
Church before, but by falling back upon the creed of Nice as 
received from the Apostles. She did not in either case raise 
the axe and the hammer against the image of Dagon : but only 
set up the ancient Ark of the covenant by his side, and Dagon 
straightway fell and was broken before the ancient symbol. 



A UNITY POSSIBLE. 273 
. , 

It is high time these facts were understood. The Assembly 
of Westminster, and the Synods of Dort and Geneva and 
Heidelberg, did have the "arrogance" to sit down, Bible in 
hand, and compile a creed. But the Church never imagined 
that she had authority to write one single word or syllable in the 
Christian Creed : but confined herself within her proper limits, 
as a mere "Witness and Keeper, without mutilation or addi- 
tion, of that which had been the faith " from the beginning." 

We insist that this matter shall now be understood. 
Presbyterianism makes creeds. Popery makes creeds. 
The Church makes none. She would as soon think of 
making a Bible, as a creed. When the Eeformation, whose 
" morning star" arose in England in the person of WicklifFe, 
called the Church of England to her feet, and made her 
signals that the day had dawned, and that there was a work 
for her to do : she did not take her Bible and sit down, as 
sects did then, and as individuals do now, gravely to look for 
a religion. She did not take a sheet of white paper, as did 
Calvin and Luther and the Presbyterian divines, and pre- 
sume, or dare, to write one word upon it, as a creed. She 
found the paper already written on, and part of it written on 
from the beginning. She could distinguish the ancient from 
the new handwriting. She erased from it, for ever, what 
Rome had added ; she left in its ancient type what had been 
from the beginning. She did not add. She did not take 
away. She did not alter. She wrote Articles, not in her 
Creed, but in another place, simply to explain what she had 
done. And once more she stood on the ground where Uni- 
versal Christendom had stood, in one array, for six hundred 
years. She calls therefore her faith the Catholic or Universal 
Eaith, and herself a Branch of the Catholic or Universal 
Church. It is the only Eaith that ever was Universal ; it is 
the only Church that can be shown to have been ever Uni- 
versal. And as Popery itself has retained the Eaith, but 



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LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



overshadowed it with additions, (just as Westminster and 
Geneva have retained it too, but encumbered it with dogmas 
hard to be believed :) we perceive that beneath the rubbish 
of the very Papacy still lies this guarded pearl, at this mo- 
ment the Universal Faith of a Universal Church. The creed 
of Trent was never Universal. The creed of Westminster 
was never Universal. Neither was Popery. Neither was 
Presbytery. Yet, with all the manly and rightful Catholicity 
of the Episcopal Church, she has never ventured to make a 
creed. She confesses to the world, and denies not, but con- 
fesses that she is but an earthen vessel for a heavenly treasure ; 
the humble Witness and Keeper of " the Faith once delivered 
to the saints :" that she would no more presume to touch that 
Ark of Testimony, to steady it when rocking over the rough 
places of the Arian heresy and the upheaving Reformation, 
than she would put forth her hand to tear down the pillars 
of heaven. The Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds — these are 
thy creeds, O thou Church of my understanding and my 
heart ! Simple, but sublime ; brief, but sufficient ; so brief 
they are, that they may both be printed on the palm of a 
Christian's hand : yet are they so sufficient, that the demon 
of . Arianism, in the first great conflict of the Church, went 
out howling from her presence ; and Popery herself did them 
homage in flying before them out of England. It was a sub- 
lime spectacle — a multitude of priests and mitred heads 
assembled out of all lands, to hear and to bear the testimony 
of the Universal Church against the teachings of Arius ; 
Europe, Asia, and Africa, all in agony for the result : yet the 
holy synod contented itself with saying, not what should be 
hereafter, but what had been from the beginning, in all places, 
the faith of the Church ! Twelve centuries roll by, and again 
the mitred heads of an empire are in synod, and again the 
Church is in her agony : but she is again content to fall back 
upon the ancient faith, separating it only from the additions 



A UNITY POSSIBLE. 



275 



of Eome. Under the benign sway of this brief and simple 
creed, the Christian world was in one communion for six 
hundred years: and if the "thing that hath been is that 
which shall be," the Christian world may yet see fit to 
restrain themselves within the limits that this creed pre- 
scribes, or rather to walk forth into the larger liberty that 
this creed allows. It contains the essential faith, and nothing 
that is not essential : nothing of the worship of the host, or 
of dead men's bones, or of the immaculate conception, on the 
one hand ; nothing of predestination, and limited redemption, 
and irresistible grace, on the other. Alas ! why did Rome 
encroach upon the liberty of private judgment, when the an- 
cient creed allowed it to range, and to reach different con- 
clusions, on a thousand matters of individual opinion? And 
why did Westminster and Geneva follow in the footsteps of 
the Trentine bishops 1 Liberty ! where will you go to find 
it ? Not to Trent ; she legislates on every thing, and leaves 
no room for private judgment. Not to Geneva ; she legis- 
lates at equal length, with the same detail, on matters of 
mere opinion. As there were divines at Rome who " shut 
up the terrestrial body of Galileo in a dungeon, for asserting 
the motion of those bodies that are celestial :" so there were 
divines at Westminster who would hardly allow a man to 
be predestinated to salvation, unless he would consent that 
infants of a span long might, by the Father of mercies, be 
predestinated to perdition. 

The case then, presented to my mind, was this. The " Chris- 
tian world" is found under three general varieties — Papal, 
Presbyterian, and Episcopal. In point of doctrine, the creeds 
of Trent and Westminster are too detailed, too unwieldy, 
too metaphysical, too unlike the creeds held universally by 
the primitive Church, to afford the slightest reasonable hope 
that the world shall ever embrace them. The Episcopal 
creed, on the contrary, is the undiminished, unenlarged, un- 



276 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



altered, verbatim et literatim Creed of the first six centuries ; 
the same Creed which Poly carp in Asia, and Irenseus in Eu- 
rope, and Augustine in Africa, preserved as the very bond of 
Unity ; which sixty millions of Oriental Catholics acknowledge 
to this hour ; which we find imbedded in strong foundations 
under the rubbish of Rome itself ; on which the Church of En- 
gland fell back in her great battle with the Papacy ; and for 
which both Poly carp and Cranmer, fourteen hundred miles and 
fourteen hundred years apart, perished gloriously in the fires. 

Let me then go back, said I, beyond the times and the 
rise of Popery and Presbyterianism, when the whole company 
of Christian people on earth, with a wisdom that we find only 
in ages of inspiration, were content with these short and sim- 
ple symbols, which so properly, and with such happy results, 
permit an infinite variety of opinion on minor matters, and 
safely leave ten thousand things to the varying influences 
of private judgment. Let me shake off, said I,— even if I 
myself believe them, — the inflated creeds of Westminster and 
Geneva, of Augsburg and Dort, of Trent and Rome, of 
Heidelberg and Saybrook ; which all require of me more than 
all mankind can be expected to believe : and let me go back, 
with the Church of England and her daughters that already 
gird the globe, to the one Eaith and the One Holy Catholic 
and Apostolic Church throughout the earth. They certainly 
hold out a reasonable hope of re-uniting the distracted world, 
on what is admitted by all sectarians, and by Papists too, to 
have been once, for whole bright centuries, the only Creed of 
Christendom. Within the spacious inclosure of this creed, 
the Methodist, as Mr. Wesley felt, may breathe with comfort ; 
while an earnest liturgy will aid the loud amens and warm 
ejaculations of the people. Beneath this vine the Calvinist 
may dwell in quietness ; for the Church has had her Augustines, 
and Henrys, and Scotts, and Topladys, and Huntingdons. In 
these wells of salvation the Immersionist too may bathe ; for 



A UNITY POSSIBLE. 



277 



the Church has preferred immersion in her theory and in her 
rubrics, and the common substitution of sprinkling (said to 
have been originally resorted to in extreme cases) may have 
been an innovation of that Popery which has never feared to 
lay its hand upon the very sacraments. The foundations of 
this Church are wide ; there is room for all — all who do not 
touch the short and simple faith. Some have in these days 
even questioned the divine right of Bishops : and yet have 
remained in her communion, rather than break the bond of 
Unity. In the times of old, there were good men who 
deferred their own and their children's baptism to a late 
period of life, for fear of sins that might, after baptism, grieve 
unpardonably the Holy Ghost imparted in that blessed sacra- 
ment : from which, perhaps, the extreme inference may be 
derived, that even the Baptist might have sat down quietly 
within the Church, for the love of the brethren, and for the 
sake of Unity, leaving his scruples to the influence of time ; 
and there would have been none to harm him. 

So long as men's minds are carried away with the undue 
magnifying of some small matter — immersion, election, 
rights of Presbyters — they are not in a position to see the 
force of this reasoning. We must rise higher, and yet 
higher, until we reach an elevation from which we may be 
able to see the entire Church — the past and the present — at 
once. With toil and tears did I climb up to that point 
of observation. I saw the Church nowhere so lovely as in 
the past, when her creed was shortest. To me the influence 
was overwhelming. Here is the only creed on earth that was 
ever universal. It is an outline of the essential faith. It 
came from the Apostles. It is the great protector of the 
right of private judgment. Its great principle — worthy of 
being written, not in letters of gold, but rather worthy 
of being written, as it was written, in the blood of the 
martyrs : " in ?iecessariis, unitas ; in dubiis, libertas ; in 

24 



278 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



omnibus, caritas :" fm things essential, unity; in things 
doubtful, liberty ; in all tilings, charity :" — is ample as the 
universe. Let me then go back to the ancient tilings, said I, 
and repossess myself of the ancient name — older than 
Wesley, older than Presbyterian, older than Lutheran, Re- 
formed, or Calvinist — ay, older than Roman. " Christian 
the name ; Catholic the surname." On this foundation 
unity is possible ; and on this alone is it possible. And on 
this rock still stands the Episcopal Church, inviting the 
world back to the " status in quo ante bellum !" 

Although I have written thus in seeming strains of hope, 
have I any expectation that these visions of brotherhood 
shall become, before long, a refreshing reality 1 Have I any 
hope that the Presbyterian bodies of Geneva, and Germany, 
and Switzerland, and Denmark, and England, and Ireland, 
and France, and Prussia, shall reconvene at Heidelberg, 
Geneva, Augsburg, Dort, London, and Belfast, and restore 
by acclamation to His brow, the Crown of Glory which they 
have taken from the Son of God 1 Have I a hope that the 
Conferences, and the Associations, and the General Assem- 
blies of America, shall make overtures of return and recon- 
ciliation to the Ancient Church ? No, none whatever. 
" There must first come a falling away" — that dark, chaotic, 
dismal period, which, although it must be short, is enough to 
make the good man tremble as he looks into the page of 
prophecy, now almost legible in the signs of the times. We 
believe, we know, we see, that Presbyterianism will fall — 
is falling — has, in nearly all lands, fallen already — from its 
hold on the sides through a Mediator ; and is cast upon the 
earth, covered with the awful leprosy of Rationalism : and the 
only hope we cherish for this generation, is to persuade men 
who may have eyes, to see the flood that has already over- 
flowed the fairest portions of the Presbyterian world, and will 
as surely overwhelm the residue, that they may escape with 



A UNITY POSSIBLE. 



279 



their sons and daughters into the Ark. The battle of the Church 
will not be fought with Presbyterianism, but with that brood 
of fancies which Presbyterianism hourly begets ; perhaps not 
even with Rome, but with the frightful progeny that Rome, 
by the same process, engenders. Her battle will be with the 
great and terrible Antichrist, who shall appear when the 
vintage of the earth shall be ripe for him to gather. The 
shock must come, and the Church will not be unprepared. 
She is at this moment industriously girding on her harness 
for some mighty task, to which the spirit of prophecy that is 
in her is evidently calling her. She, who in the dark ages 
could maintain the faith, and in the eras of light could sepa- 
rate it from error, and amidst the change of the times can 
preserve it still intact, whether from the developments of Po- 
pery, or the wild progress of Protestantism : may look forward 
to the approach of Antichrist, and say, " The Lord that de- 
livered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of 
the bear, He will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine." 

" That great day of God Almighty" — who does not see its 
dawning % Who does not hear the tread of Gog and Magog 
upon the mountains 1 Who does not see the banners moving, 
and hear the confused shout among the nations 1 Who does 
not see the towering head of Antichrist, rising "above all 
that is called God, or is worshipped V O Sectarianism ! 
thou hast no shelter " in the day that shall burn as an oven !" 
Alas ! that day is one of thine own kindling ! Thank God, he 
hath shown to one who is less than the least of all, the ancient 
foundations. I see their strength; I see their harmony; I 
see their Unity ; I see their antiquity ; I see their elevation 
above the light and darkness, the changes and chances of this 
lower sphere ; I see a baptized world standing shoulder to 
shoulder for centuries upon them : I hope to see — although it 
may not be until the Lamb shall have wiped all tears from 
our eyes — a baptized world standing on them again ! 



CHAPTER XV. 

CATHOLICITY. 

I find that I have touched a chord endless in its vibrations ; 
have uttered a word boundless in its meaning ; have hinted 
a truth, bright, beautiful, holy ; a truth that no man, cramped 
and hemmed in by an ism. hath seen or can see ; a truth un- 
trammelled by space or place ; unlimited by duration or time ; 
unaffected by chance or change ; its presence, everywhere ; 
its existence, always; its empire, all things, whether they 
be things in heaven or things on earth ; itself, the image of 
the Universal Father : for. the moment we see it, and ask 
whose image and superscription it hath, it answers by its very 
existence — God's. But the Catholic idea — for this it is to 
which we have now come — would charm me too far away, 
and detain the reader too long, from the course of this narra- 
tive. I must therefore resist the temptation ; but not with- 
out protesting, that my conversion has been less properly a 
conversion to Episcopacy than to Catholicity: certainly not 
to Episcopacy as sometimes drawn by our masters — high and 
beautiful and stately as the snows upon the summer moun- 
tains, but as cold and frigid as the eternal ice ; high, dry, 
pompous, and freezing — an Episcopacy which is naked and 
cold because it is alone, (for how can a truth be warm alone V) 
and which, like Immersionism or Little-childrenisin, is but 



CATHOLICITY. 



281 



the one idea — bald, naked, shivering, starving — of a narrow 
mind. I should rather say, that my conversion has been to 
that which the Episcopacy indicates as generally present with 
itself, and as certainly present nowhere else — in a word, as I 
said, to Catholicity ; something for all times, for all places, 
for all intellects, for all hearts; breaking down the walls 
between temple and temple ; forbidding the barriers between 
Christian and Christian ; healing the breaches between man and 
man ; denying the distinctions between rich and poor ; refusing 
to know either Jew or Greek, Barbarian or Scythian, bond or 
free ; feeding all on the one Bread ; blessing for all the one 
Cup ; shining with equal attractiveness on the child and the 
philosopher ; bathing beggars and princes in the same waters ; 
gathering all things back together into One ; and thus realizing 
the great conception imbedded in the very word re-ligion* 
binding all to each other again, and all once more to God : a 
Catholicity throbbing throughout earth and heaven with one 
pulse ; beating, breathing, burning, bursting with one intention, 
one heart, one life ; circling the earth with its sympathies ; 
conquering the world by its determination ; and weaving for 
the King when He shall return in His beauty with His spouse, 
a woof of hearts reaching back to the Apostles, and conveying 
in all its threads the electric fire first kindled at the Cross, and 
communicated to the Twelve. 

This, I have said, is what a sectarian — isolated, and im- 
mured in an ism, or a one-idea — can never understand ; how 
"all the Body," as St. Paul expresses it, "by joints and 
bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, in- 
creased with the increase of God." Catholicity, like an 
affection or a passion, or rather like life itself, must be felt, 
and fe]t to be ours: else it can no more be understood (and I 
who have known it have a right to say it) than a severed 
branch can feel the circulation of the vine, or an amputated 

* From the Latin religo -to bind again. 

24* 



282 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH.. 



limb be warmed with the sympathies and pulsations of the 
body. 

But though the secret of Catholicity is with her children, 
and her secret can never be imparted : yet it is pleasing to 
see that sectarians begin to understand that there is some- 
thing within the veil. The " Advocate and J ournal" has 
lately told it to the Methodists, and been candid enough to 
express satisfaction at the fact ; the " Independent" has just 
discovered it to the Congregationalists, and speaks quite rea- 
sonably ; and Dr. Nevin, in his chair, has but the other day 
enlightened the Lutherans with the information that Catholi- 
city is a living energy : " deep-lodged," says Professor Nevin, 
" in the constitution of the age, and carrying in itself the gath- 
ered strength of centuries ;" " possessing," says the Independ- 
ent, " such fascination and» power, that we do not wonder 
that some of the most manly intellects and purest hearts of 
the age have been captivated by its claims." Says Professor 
Nevin, " Protestantism, in its blind zeal and shallow knowl- 
edge, sinking the Church to the level of a temperance so- 
ciety, stripping the Ministry of its divine Authority, reducing 
the Sacraments to mere signs, turning all that is Mystical 
into the most trivial sense, and so exalting what is individual 
above what is general and Catholic, as to throw open the 
door to the most rampant sectarian license in the name of 
the gospel, can never, I repeat it, prevail against Oxford or 
Rome." Well, something has been gained ; and although 
Catholicity is free-masonry to them that are without, yet we 
are glad to hope that we are no longer to be taunted with 
adhering to the mere dogma of a bald, pompous, lifeless, 
isolated, and freezing Episcopacy. 

Who can wonder that, so long as such an Episcopacy was 
insisted on, the claim has never been made to appear even 
reasonable ? Who can be surprised that Papist and Presby- 
terian, Baptist and Methodist, have fought against it 1 Who 



CATHOLICITY. 



283 



can wonder that Episcopalians, exulting in the one idea, and 
making it the only dividing thing on earth between them and 
the " other denominations," have been taken to task by Mr. 
Barnes for their " position 1" There are men, and there are 
bishops, who even now banish from the sanctuary the Cross, 
the symbol of all truth : but have a precious care to set up 
the Mitre the symbol of one truth. And why ? Because, in 
their theology, the mitre is the only thing left to divide them 
in principle from the " other denominations ;" and this the 
" other denominations" can never comprehend. But exhibit 
our Holy Church as preserving unimpeached and unimpaired 
the ancient faith, our worship as the daily and earnest utter- 
ance in which we join the souls under the altar, our unity as 
inviolable like the unity of the Holy Ghost, our sacraments 
as quickening instruments of grace, our Catholicity as bind- 
ing the past to the present, the present to the future, man to 
his brother, and all to Heaven : and Episcopacy as the sen- 
tinel at the door, never mistaking the trappings of his office 
for the treasures of the palace — an Episcopacy above the 
whisperings and jealousies and heart-burnings and man- 
pleasings of an evil day, earnestly intent jojq. guarding, not its 
own poor dignity, but the Church which God hath purchased 
with His Blood : and the world will cease to wonder that 
we contend for the Episcopacy, not as being the one truth 
which sectarians have not, but because it is the guard of a 
thousand truths, associations, sympathies, energies, and treas- 
ures which ..they can never have. An icy, barren dogma — a 
one-idea — a bald, narrow-minded, bigoted, high-low and low- 
church Episcopacy, the only thing preventing our fraterniza- 
tion with the sects'? — with all mv soul I would fight against it, 
too ! The Church has groaned, and grown gaunt and ghastly, 
and has dwindled and disappeared from whole neighborhoods 
under such school-boy and contracted teachings. 

It is a poor apology for such narrow views, that the Church 



284 LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



in this country has chosen to be called " Protestant Epis- 
copal:" a name open, we admit, to misapprehension; but 
well intended, when well interpreted: PROTESTANT, 
against the doctrinal errors of either Popery or Presbytery ; 
EPISCOPAL, against the usurpation of both Popes and 
Presbyters. 

There are prudent men, however, who think it to be re- 
gretted that the Church in America did not take her name 
rather from her resemblance to antiquity, than from her con- 
trast with Rome — Rome too much honored, they think, by 
the homage. Is Popery, they say, the pole-star by which 
churches are to steer % Is Popery the sun that is to fill all 
eyes, around which all sects, as planets struck from her 
body, are to roll and do homage, and by which the other 
bodies are to take their bearings, and measure their perihe- 
lions and aphelions, such and such a distance from the sun, 
and calculate each other's obscurations, penumbras, occupa- 
tions, transits, eclipses, and number of digits immersed ? Just 
as she was rising from her low estate, it may have promised 
the Church in this land some dignity and importance to assert 
herself the champion (for so far as I am aware it is the only 
body of Christians that has formally taken the name of 
" Protestant") now ready to measure weapons with gigantic 
Rome ! But there are pure and prudent men who would 
rather have seen her measuring stature with antiquity, or 
faith with Scripture. Be this as it may, it is a most singular 
historical fact, that Evangelical Protestants in Europe are be- 
coming embarrassed by the name.* Thus in the recent con- 

* The beautiful prayer in the English Liturgy, " More especially we pray for the 
good estate of the Catholic Church, &c," was altered in our Liturgy so as to read, 
« More especially we pray for thy holy Church universal, &c," for the alleged 
reason, that persons not familiar with our service might understand the expression 
as identifying us with the Papists. Be this so, the change of phraseology has led to 
a still worse mistake, for on hearing the corrected prayer, strangers have some- 
times asked whether we were Universalists. We live in an age of great intelli- 
gence in matters of religion! 



f 



CATHOLICITY. 



285 



struction of the great lever by which the new root-and-branch 
men are to uproot Popery from the earth, although the pur- 
pose was Protestant, yet they avoided the name, and called 
themselves the " Evangelical Alliance." " Protestants" would 
hardly have answered, for it would have let into the Alliance 
twenty Socinians to one " Evangelical." And the American 
branch of this .very Alliance publishes a periodical in New 
York, entitled " Der Freie Deutsche Katholik"— " The Eree 
German Catholic" — for among Germans the word Protestant 
would have meant Infidel. When I was a Presbyterian, at a 
hotel in Germany, in a mixed company at dinner, a debate 
arose between some Romish Priests and German Protestants, 
in which I was appealed to, and sided with the priests. " Why ! 
are you not a Protestant V inquired a German who sat near 
me. " No, sir," I replied ; " I believe in God, the Father, the 
Son, and the Holy Ghost, and so far I am a Catholic." The 
celebrated Presbyterian orator and preacher of Lyons, M. 
Monod, said not very long ago in a speech before the Bible 
Society in Exeter Hall, that when he had been asked in his 
own country if he was a Protestant, he answered, " No ; for 
a Protestant is a man that believes nothing. Yes, my lord," 
continued M. Monod, " that is the bad reputation we have 
got in France, in consequence of the very loose doctrines of 
the men of Geneva, which go to break down the glory of 
our Lord Jesus Christ ; and hence, throughout France, they 
think that we Protestants have nothing any more that we 
believe." Even D'Aubigne is shy and sly upon this point, 
and puts in a disclaimer and a caveat in the first paragraph 
of his Preface to his " great work." " The history of the 
Reformation," he says, " is altogether distinct from the history 
of Protestantism. In the former all bears the character of a 
regeneration of human nature, a religious and social transfor- 
mation emanating from God himself. In the latter we see 
too often a glaring depravation of first principles, the conflict 



i 



286 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



of parties, the sectarian spirit, and the operation of private 
interests. The history of Protestantism might claim the at- 
tention of mere Protestants ; the history of the Reformation 
is a book for all Christians, or rather for all mankind." We 
thank M. D'Aubigne for thus much candor; it is as much as 
we had any reason to expect. The rack must pinch when the 
martyr groans. He glories in the Reformation, but he is shy 
of Protestantism ; he admires the throes of the mother, but 
is vastlv cautious of acknowledging the child. So much for 
the well-meant name of " Protestant" — a name that the 
Houses of Convocation, when it was last proposed to adopt it 
in England, even then felt it a duty to repudiate ; choosing 
rather to be called, like the Church of Corinth, or the Church 
of Ephesus. or the Church of Smyrna, or the Church of Thya- 
tira, " the Church of England." The name of Protestant is a 
negation ; it protests, it resists, it denies, it believes not, it 
means nothing. The name, as well as the operation of the 
system among sectarian Protestants, gives one the idea that 
its life is the result of conflicting forces acting in temporary- 
antagonism, and must die when the antagonism ceases. So 
history shows. So our observation proves. A sectarian 
Protestant is never so devout, so grave, so earnest, so reso- 
lute, as in the task of pulling down, of making war, of attack- 
ing. Now the battle is against slavery, and now alcohol, and 
now Popery, and now against something else, and now against 
each other, and finally against its own standards. Its piety 
cannot live in the calm routine of life ; its faith cannot settle 
down on known and tried foundations, but must be ever in 
the perils of controversy; its devotion seems to depend 
upon excitement, as the schoolboy ? s kite can rise only in a 
breeze, or as his top (says one) can be kept up only by whip- 
ping. Sectarian Protestantism, as a resisting force, can live 
only by antagonism ; it is the storm-bird that cannot bear a 
calm, that loves the wild confusion of the whirlwind, and 



CATHOLICITY. 



287 



disappears so soon as the conflict of the elements is over. 
Even Monod and D'Aubigne have blushed ! 

Also the name " Episcopal," while it significantly enough 
condemns the usurpation of both Popes and Presbyters in 
riding over the conservative element of the Episcopacy, has 
nevertheless been open to misconstruction, and has made us 
a stone of stumbling to Dissenters. 

Episcopacy ! Episcopacy ! Episcopacy ! as if Bishop, 
Bishop were the first thing, the only thing, the every thing 
for which we contended. And it is not to be doubted that 
the popular title of the " Episcopal Church" by which we are 
known, has to some extent authorized the popular prejudice, 
that a naked, barren, haughty Episcopacy was the summum 
bonum of our creed, the all-in-all, essence and quintessence 
■ of our Church ; and the iteration of a naked Episcopacy 
by controversial writers has filled the sects with prejudice. 
With regard to the relative importance of Episcopacy in the 
mighty circle of Catholic faith and grace, I should not fear to 
let Dr. Miller know that we have little fault to find with the 
reasonings of the " famous Jerome :" that it is but a part of 
the Christian priesthood ; that in the acts of absolution and 
of the consecration of the Eucharist, a Bishop is no more than 
the equal of his Presbyter ; that a Presbyter may absolve a 
Bishop, as a Bishop may absolve a Presbyter; that " ordina- 
tione excepta" is the distinguishing mark of his Order ; and 
that a Bishop is but one among many brethren, not so much 
the sensitive defender of his title, as he is the strong man 
armed to keep the treasures of the house of God. 

This has been the nature of my own conversion — not to 
a name, to a bare Episcopacy, to a one-idea — but to the 
Catholic religion, to a thousand truths in one, to a thousand 
sympathies not born of earth, to a thousand thrilling associa- 
tions with the past, to a thousand joints and bands that keep 
the weak from falling, to a thousand hallowed soul-stirring 



288 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUECH. 



influences found nowhere else ; to the Body of Christ, left by 
Him here when the Head went up, to say, to do, to suffer, 
what He left unsaid, undone, unsuffered, to "fill up that 

which is behind of the afflictions of Christ, for His Body's 

sake, which is the Church :" a Catholicity that covers all times, 
all places, all truths, all things in Christ. And here, as I have 
said, I would stay awhile, and build two tabernacles, one for 
the reader, and one for myself : for since I have burst the 
bands of sect and schism, the earth around me is a new earth', 
and the heavens over me are new heavens, and I see a uni- 
verse unalterably radiant with truth, harmony, and love. 
But I must retrace my steps, and go once more into the plain 
below, and show the reader, if he will renew his company and 
sympathy, what things I have suffered besides, in coming to 
the heavenly Jerusalem. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



ELDERS AND DEATH-BEDS. 



Those whom I knew when a boy as the "bench of elders" 
in a congregation, have latterly, among the Presbyterians, 
been dignified by the more august title of the " Parochial 
Presbytery." And the title may be well enough allowed; 
for their ministers, whether in Parish, Presbytery, Synod, or 
General Assembly, are on all questions — the fondest sub- 
tleties of theology, the dearest privileges of their order, 
the largest interests of the whole denomination — on a bare 
equality with their elders. If a minister be suspected of un- 
soundness in the faith, although the issue may depend on the 
nicest possible hair splittings of metaphysics, and the results 
may be more terrible to the accused than death itself: he must 
be tried, not by his peers, but by a court ascertained in limine 
to be incompetent to judge him. 

Although I, for the moment, call their elders their laity, a 
controversy has lately sprung up among them, in which in- 
fluential names have taken the ground, that the ruling elder 
is of the same order with the teaching elder or minister; 
otherwise, says Dr. Breckinridge, Presbyterians have after all 
retained the Prelacy : "one is preferred (prelatus,)" he says, 
"above the rest, and if this is not Prelacy," he asks, "what 
is it ?" This dispute has grown out of the question (proh 
pudor!) whether ruling elders should impose hands jointly 

25 



290 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



with the ministers, in ordination ! — a question pronounced by 
a grave divine of the Old School to be " practically the ques- 
tion between a Hierarchical and a Presbyterian government :" 
"because," quoth he, "if the elders are of a different order 
from the ministers, then, with our deacons, we have three 
orders, or essential prelacy, in which one is pre-late or pre- 
ferred above another." Call these elders, however, what they 
may — style them bishops, if they choose, and as some of them 
propose — the reader will see that the preaching bishop is 
overwhelmed in his parish by the number of the ruling, 
bishops. And verily, by Dr. Breckinridge's showing, a poor 
bishop-ridden pastor, instead of having one Bishop to ride 
him, has from three to fifteen ! 

I had fifteen ! They were the legacy of my predecessor, 
a divine of no mean authority ; and I have still a recollection 
of the extent to which some of the ruling elders had a right 
good will to rule. They took the ground — and if I mistake 
not, the prevailing tone of the denomination would now bear 
them out — that the pastor, or teaching elder, is only the ex- 
ecutive of the ruling elders. To give an instance : I saw 
proper to print a form of baptism and of admission to the 
communion, which was thought by some of the "parochial 
presbytery" to savor of Episcopacy, although it exhibited 
nothing more than the teachings of their own Confession ; and 
accordingly an obstinate though abortive attempt was made 
to vote the pastor into a minority, and into the adoption of a 
form which one of them was actually at the pains to prepare, 
but which, on perusal, I assured them was no more consonant 
with the Confession of Faith in its theology, than it was with 
the English tongue in its grammatical construction.* Eifteen 

* At this time, one of the deacons also took me sagely to task for requiring the 
parents, at Baptism, to teach the baptized child the Apostles'* Creed. " And who 
knows," said he, "that it is the Apostles' Creed, or that the Apostles ever heard 
of it ?" I replied, " The Confession of Faith, then, is mistaken !" " The Con- 



ELDEES AND DEATH-BEDS. 



291 



ruling bishops ! I had heard that the little finger of Puritan- 
ism was thicker than the loins of Prelacy. I had heard that 
poor Brown, the inventor of the Congregational theory, lived 
to repent in dust and sackcloth his surrender of the keys. I had 
heard that a minister in the days of Cotton Mather had said, 
" I fled from the Church of England, to escape the tyranny of 
my Lord-Bishops ; but I was glad to get back again, to escape 
the tyranny of my lord-brethren." " For what is the deacon," 
says Mr. John Angell James, " in some of our dissenting 
communities'? The patron of the living, the Bible of the 
minister, the wolf of the flock. In many of our churches the 
pastor is depressed far below him. His opinion is treated 
with no deference. His person is treated with no respect. 
In the presence of his lay tyrants, he is only permitted to 
peep and mutter in the dust." " I foresee," said Melancthon, 
" that unless we restore the government of Bishops, there 
will be hereafter a more intolerable tyranny than there ever 
was before." By the change that I have made, I find, for my 
own part, that instead of 'fifteen ruling bishops that thus were 
over me, not one of them capable of sympathizing with the 
sorrows and cares of the pastoral office : I am now under the 
mild sway of one, who is not an high priest that cannot be 
touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but who has 
drunk himself the pastor's cup, whose gentle counsels it is a 
privilege to seek, and whose mild rule it is, for Christ's sake, 
a pleasure to obey. 

Especially in the administration of what Presbyterians 
once knew as " sealing ordinances," but now fritter down 
under the name of " rites," the preaching elder, or pastor, is 
the simple executive or agent, to carry out the decision of 
the ruling elders or bishops ; and, as may be supposed, there 

fession of Faith don't call it the Apostles' Creed," replied Mr. W. « Yes, sir, it 
does ; if you will look again, you will see that it calls" it the Apostles' 1 Creed, and 
requires it to be taught to our children." 



» 



292 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



are cases in which this interference with the liberty of the 
pastoral office leads to consequences of the most painful 
nature. 

A Quaker lady once resided in my parish, whom I never 
knew until I saw her on the bed of death. She was very 
anxious to be baptized ; and, for myself, I was as heartily in- 
clined to receive her into the congregation of the flock of 
Christ. But it being inconvenient, in a sick-room, to assemble 
the elders in order to hear her " experience," and it being 
cruel to think of subjecting the candidate to the agitations 
of so public a confessional, and as I saw that nature was fast 
sinking, and that what I should do for the dying lady must 
be done quickly : I endeavored to procure informally the con- 
sent of as many of the elders as I could conveniently find, 
and proceed to receive this lamb of Christ's redeeming to 
His fold. But with one consent they begged me by no means 
to administer the " rite," for fear a compliance should seem 
to attach an undue importance to " a mere external." My 
own mind was clear ; my heart was ready ; O God, my heart 
was ready ! Christ, I could not doubt, would allow the char- 
itable work ; the Father was waiting with the bright robe 
to put upon His child, and shoes for her feet to cross the 
dark river now gloomily winding through the vale, and a 
ring for her hand to claim a place withal among the children 
in her Father's house ; and, in an agony which only the con- 
junction of repentance with the dying hour can produce, a 
blood-bought daughter asks, " What doth hinder me to be 
baptized V O ye elders, and ye ministers of Presbyterian- 
ism, is there aught in the Word of God that hinders % " He 
that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved ;" " Except a 
man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into 
the kingdom of God ;" " The like figure whereunto even 
baptism doth also now save us ;" " According to His mercy 
He hath saved us by the washing of regeneration, [by 



ELDEES AND DEATH-BEDS. 293 



Calvin and other Presbyterian commentators allowed to be 
baptism,] and the renewing of the Holy Ghost ;" " Having 
our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies 
washed with pure water ;" " Arise and be baptized, and 
wash away thy sins ;" " Repent and be baptized, every one 
of you, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the 
Holy Ghost:" — thick and fast these texts came rushing to 
my mind. But against all these, and the entreaties of a 
dying penitent, came the stern mandate of a " parochial 
Presbytery," entrusted by the Westminster system with the 
responsibility of " admission to sealing ordinances." Yet 
Presbytery vaunts itself as being so wondrous " liberal," and 
endeavors to decry Episcopacy as " intolerant and exclusive." 
Be it known, then, that it is a canon of the Ancient Church, 
that the sacraments are never to be withheld when requested 
by the dying. Be a sacrament but a straw, if Presbyterians 
who once called it a seal will now have it so ; the Church 
from the beginning has forbidden a straw to be laid in the 
way of a child's return : so careful is our Holy Mother lest 
she should break the bruised reed, or quench the smoking 
flax. As I returned to the lady, it seemed as if I could have 
given the world, if this necessity were not laid upon me. I 
I felt like one returning from a bench of Inquisitors. I had 
heard de comburendis hereticis ; but this was a more exquisite 
invention de angendis morientibus. Heavy-hearted I went 
back to the chamber of the penitent. " Does any man forbid 
water that I should be baptized V inquired the dying woman. 
As gently as I could let the awful words fall upon her ear, I 
told her she must die as she was. I saw her soul was dark. 
One that stood by wiped the death-sweat from her brow. But, 
endeavoring to satisfy myself that the tyranny of the rulers 
would excuse the sin on my part, and their ignorance ex- 
tenuate it upon theirs, I endeavored to console the dying 
penitent with the assurance, that the desire of baptism was 

/ 



294 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



equivalent to its reception upon her part. But the painfulness 
and the sinfulness of that transaction, although done in igno- 
rance, and many years ago, are things that, to this hour, and 
to the latest hour of my life,* I shall never be able to think 
of without shame and sadness. I never turn that street, but 
the scenes of that occasion come picturing their horrid forms 
before me. I never see that house, without smiting on my 
breast, and saying, O Lord, forgive ! 

On the whole subject of administering sacraments to the 
sick and dying, there is among Presbyterians as profound an 
indifference as among the Quakers, and an unrelenting reso- 
luteness in their elders and their ministers. I have known 
one of the most amiable of their pastors to withhold the rite, 
as Presbyterians now term it — the right, as an Episcopalian 
would say — of holy baptism from his own child, as it lay 
dying ; although a prudent and judicious wife, whose counsels 
he was glad to hear on any other subject, begged, with a 
mother's earnestness, that the Shepherd's mark might be 
laid upon her dying lamb, as she was about to give it back 
into the Shepherd's arms. An infant is happily unconscious 
of these wrongs. But when an earnest penitent, in whose 
ears the awful hour of eleven is tolling, desires " to fulfil all 
righteousness :" the heartless refusal which will not " suffer it 
to be so" is- an offence against humanity, and against all the 
liberties and rights of humanity redeemed, which only the 
most stern and intolerant of theories could ever have con- 
ceived. 

There recently lived, in the city of Richmond, a well- 
known Presbyterian divine, who was sent for, not many 
years ago, to administer the communion to a sick member of 
his church, as determined to receive it, as the pastor was to 
withhold it. But when his parishioner, to unburden the pas- 
tor of his scruples in the matter, intimated the expedient of 
seeking the services of a clergyman whose Church delighted 



ELDERS AND DEATH-BEDS. 



295 



to allow " that most comfortable sacrament" to the sick and 
sorrowing, the good minister's scruples about fostering 
superstition were waived, and the communion was allowed. 
This, so far as I can recollect, is the only instance, save one, 
that I have known in this country, in which a Presbyterian, ex- 
pressing a desire for " the children's bread" — a desire, I have 
good reason to suppose, much oftener felt than uttered — was 
allowed by his minister the viaticum, as the martyrs and 
dying believers used to call it, for the last journey. There 
has quite recently occurred a most painful case, in the northern 
portion of the city of New York, where an eminent Presby- 
terian divine, one, too, who has been a mouthpiece and ex- 
ponent of the Presbyterian system, refused the children's 
meat to a young lady on her dying bed, who had begged for 
the crumbs as they fell from her Master's table. Her mother 
I had myself known as a child ; the child I had known as a 
lamb in my flock, when I was myself a Presbyterian, and 
rejoiced was I to hear that she died with an appetite for the 
bread of life. Sirs, why do ye these things % Is the world 
so full of faith, that ye are afraid of exaggerating that faith 
into superstition % Is it ever & " superstition" to obey the 
commands of Jesus 1 Is it a " superstition" for a dying sin- 
ner to remember the commandment of a dying Saviour 1 If 
a man has neglected the Bible all his days, and on his sick- 
bed anxiously consults its pages : do you take it from him ? 
If the giddy girl has all through life neglected prayer, and on 
the verge of eternity begins to lift her breaking heart to 
heaven : do you forbid her 1 If your parishioner, whom you 
have often, and in vain, invited to solemn converse with you 
on the things of eternity, seeks your counsels in the dying 
hour : do you refuse ? Do you turn a deaf ear, and forbid 
these " externals" to a dying man, who needs all the aids and 
means that earth and heaven can devise to save him in the 
dreadful hour'? Why, then, should you cast out the prayer 



296 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



of a dying soul, who says to you : " Sir, I have disregarded 
the commands of Christ, and some of those commands it is 
now beyond my power to fulfil ; but there are others which 
I may yet obey : here is water, what doth hinder me to be 
baptized ? Behold, here are bread and wine : what doth 
hinder me to lay my hand upon them, and take them to 
myself ? Was not for me the Victim slain ? Am I forbid 
the children's bread? See around me unbelieving com- 
panions ; may I not leave my testimony in these solemn 
rites 1 And, behold, my prayers, how frail arid filled with 
sin - ? let me but see with my eyes the bread lie broken and 
the wine shed forth, to plead with my offended Maker as a 
Pure and Undefiled Memorial, recounting to Him, for my 
soul, the griefs and tortures, the cross and passion of His 
Son ! And behold my father, and behold my mother and 
my sisters, O may not I eat this Bread and drink this Cup 
with the?n, before I go hence and be no more seen ?" Why 
do you cast out, I say, his prayer % Are the multitudes of 
your people, when they come to die, so anxious and busy 
concerning the things of Christ, that you must check their 
ardor, for fear of its growing into " superstition f You hide 
from the eyes of the dying the mementos of the Saviour's 
passion, the symbols of the Saviour's pardon, for fear of super- 
stition ! Superstition ! Do you call it superstition in a 
dying man to hug to his heart or press to his lips the Bible, 
the Bread, the Cup, the Minister, the anything that tells of 
Christ, of redemption, and of pardon ? Superstition do you 
call it, also, if the Christian, all ripe for heaven, whose heart 
has many a time burned within him as the Blessed Master 
made Himself known in the breaking of Bread, longs in the 
dying hour, to go forth for the last time on earth to the place 
of meeting on the holy mount 1 

I have myself once lain, for many months, upon what was 
believed to be the bed of death ; and, if I may dare to say it, 



ELDERS AND DEATH-BEDS. 



297 



like the Master Himself before He suffered, " with desire I 
desired to eat this passover." I anxiously debated with my- 
self, whether I might hope to find a Presbyterian minister to 
give me " that Bread and that Cup." But as I felt myself too 
feeble to run the risk of refusal and perhaps rebuke, I re- 
quested an Episcopal clergyman to break to me the heavenly 
Bread : and richly did I enjoy the Blessed Sacrament ; for, as 
the wounds of the Sacrifice lay open before me, I thought that 
I could read more clearly than ever the great mystery that 
my sins were covered. The withholding the Sacraments 
from the sick and dying, like the denying of Baptism to 
infants, is one of those crying wrongs and cruelties, which 
Popery in its blackest night has never dared to adopt among 
her penalties, and which it was reserved for Calvinism's heart 
to invent and Calvinism's hand to execute. Yet Calvinism, 
that has stolen its inheritance from the babe in its cradle, 
and practised robbery upon the dying, and pushed its sacri- 
lege to the grave : has the courage and the art to raise in the 
crowd the cry of " illiberality" and "-intolerance !" For my- 
self, O my merciful Maker, let me die in a communion, that, 
when the chariot is at the door, and the appointed hour is 
striking, and the impatient steeds are waiting to convey me, 
will not withhold from me the traveller's Bread. O, in that 
hour, ye, my surviving friends, gather around me a company 
of the Catholic-hearted, to whom I may say : " Brothers, with 
desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I 
suffer. As for you, ye shall drink it again : but for me, I shall 
drink no more of this fruit of The Vine, until the day when I 
shall drink it new with you in the Kingdom of God." 



CHAPTER XVII. 



POPULAR LIBERTY. 

I had often heard that Episcopacy was unfriendly to the 
just principles of human liberty. And I am free to say, " If 
it was so, it was a grievous fault." I should despise the 
religion that despised the poor. I should tread beneath my 
feet the faith that trampled under foot the rights of men. I 
am enthusiastic enough to ask, 

" Has earth a clod, 
Its Maker meant not should be trod 
By man. the image of his God, 
Erect and free ?" 

I looked therefore into the matter with no little jealousy, and, 
as the result of the most patient inquiry, must say, that I be- 
lieve Episcopacy to be the true and tried friend of human 
liberty, and, in this land preeminently, the great bulwark 
now, and the main hope hereafter, of REPUBLICAN 
FREEDOM. 

The charge that Episcopacy is anti-Kepublican and illib- 
eral, has been of late years reiterated with new warmth by 
some who personally loved me once; and if I, who loved 
them in return, choose to place that church, to winch my 
pure convictions have conducted me, on its defence before 
"the public," to which it has been cited by three of my 



POPULAR LIBERTY. 



299 



classmates and by yet another of my bosom friends : I only 
pray my Maker that, in setting impartial truth before them, 
they may perceive in me one who loves them still. 

There were two aspects under which I found it necessary 
to examine the subject : the civil and the religious ; as there 
w T ere two positions from which I could examine it with ad- 
vantage : its theory, and its history. 

By the light of other minds I came to see, in spite of all 
my prejudices, that the constitution of the Episcopal Church 
embodies the essential elements of the received definitions of 
political liberty. It is a maxim of English law, that " there 
is no liberty where the judicial power is not separated from 
the legislative and executive." According to President Jef- 
ferson, " the concentration of the executive, legislative, and 
judicial powers in the same hands, is precisely the definition 
of tyranny." " No political truth," says Chief Justice Mar- 
shall, " is of greater intrinsic value, than that the legislative, 
judicial, and executive departments should be kept separated 
and distinct ; the accumulation of these powers in the same 
hands, whether of a few or of many, may be pronounced to 
be the very definition of tyranny." Accordingly, the Con- 
stitutions of the several States declare in effect, with that of 
Maryland, that "the legislative, executive, and judiciary pow- 
ers shall be for ever separate and distinct ;" so* that, in the 
words of my own native Virginia, " neither shall exercise the 
powers properly belonging to the other, nor shall any person 
exercise the powers of more than one of them, at the same 
time." " No person," declares Kentucky, " or collection of 
persons, being of one of these departments, shall exercise any 
power properly belonging to either of the others." My 
author, to whom I owe these quotations, furnishes some 
others ; but these suffice : and we may crown them with the 
farewell words of Washington, urging on the people of the 
United States " the necessity of reciprocal checks in the exer- 



300 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



cise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into 
different depositories, and constituting each the guardian of 
the public weal against invasion by the others. The consoli- 
dation of these powers in one," says Washington, at once the 
General, the Statesman, and the Churchman, " whatever the 
form of government, is a real despotism." 

Now if these definitions had been framed expressly to ex- 
hibit the great fundamental principles in the structure of the 
Episcopal Church, they could hardly have done it more ex- 
actly. As far as things temporal and things spiritual may 
coincide, the lines of coincidence are strikingly exact. The 
fact will bear investigation, that, right or wrong, the Episco- 
pacy of America is, with almost mathematical exactness, after 
the model of the Republic, with the more democratic provi- 
sion that, whereas a President may veto an act approved 
by both houses of Congress, the veto power in Episcopacy can 
be exercised only by a majority of the Bishops. A Bishop 
can no more enact a law, than may a Governor. The entire 
college of Bishops is as powerless to do it, as would be a 
college of State Governors. A Convention, whether of a 
diocese or of the whole confederacy, can no morp try a cause 
or act judicially, than a Legislature or a Congress. Through- 
out the Church the three powers are kept carefully and for 
ever distinct* And it is to be remember^, that the same 
separation of powers existed to a most wholesome extent in 
the Ancient Church, until the encroachments of the Papacy, 
taking advantage of dissensions or supineness in the churches 
around her, made vigorous and successful efforts to central- 
ize them in the chair of St. Peter ; a consolidation, against 
which the West protested long, and the whole East protested, 
and still successfully protests, as incompatible with the an- 
cient liberties of the primitive Episcopal Church. And 
Popery is not the less a despotism because it is elective. 

We do then allege, that according to the definitions by 



POPULAR LIBERTY. 



301 



Washington, Jefferson, and Marshall, the essence of despotism 
is covered up under the forms of Presbyterianism. Take first 
the purest form of Old School Presbyterianism. Its judicial 
act of 1837, separating from its communion sixty thousand 
communicants, was devised and consummated, under the 
pressure of high excitement, by the " collection of persons" 
known as the " General Assembly," — at once Legislature, 
Judiciary, and Executive — from whose decision there is no 
appeal. There is but one Being in the universe to be trusted 
with such power : and even in the bosom of God, we have 
an Advocate with the Father ; also the Holy Ghost the Com- 
forter. 

Take next the Methodists. The laity have neither repre- 
sentation nor voice in any of their legislative, judicial, or 
deliberative bodies. The preachers are as supreme as the 
priests ever were in the Papal communion. They hold the 
purse. They hold the sword. Let a man absent himself 
from the confessional of the class-meeting, without accounting 
for it, and see how the preacher's hand will straight lay hold 
on judgment ! Let any member not pay his Peter-pence, or 
quota to the funds, and right soon will the cords of disci- 
pline find him. There is no escape ! From the meanest 
member to the college-president, under the hierarchy of class- 
leaders, exhorters, local preachers, and circuit-preachers, the 
laity are under a surveillance unknown to any thing on earth, 
except the Inquisition. Scarcely may a female wear a ring 
upon her hand, a ringlet in her hair, or a bow upon her cap, 
without the censure of her lords spiritual. A congregation 
may humbly petition the so-called bishops in the matter, but 
have no more power to elect their pastor, than the writer or 
the reader of this narrative to elect one for them. Neither 
can a pastor go where he himself may wish, or remain with a 
flock ever so devoted to his person, for more than two years 
at a time — except by a rare "indulgence." The so-called 

26 



302 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



bishop says to one, Go, and he goeth : and to another, Come, 
and he cometh : and to them all, Do this, and they do it. 
There is not an Apostolic bishop in the Church of God — no, 
nor even in St. Peter's chair — that assumes, in some of these 
respects, that interference with personal liberty which the so- 
called bishops of the Methodists exercise over their subjects. 
Musgrave of Baltimore has written a quod erat demonstrandum 
on this subject, (quod vide,) and the Princeton Review allows, 
that " the society of the JesuitsJs the only one with which it 
is acquainted, that surpasses Methodism in the centralization 
of its powers." 

Take, -once more, the purer Congregationalists ; among 
whom the company of communicants is at once Legislature, 
Judge, Jury, and Executive. Such a " collection of persons" 
enacts an arbitrary law, that your daughter shall not receive 
the communion, until she come under a vow to abstain from 
intoxicating liquors. This is no dream of the dark ages of 
Popery and asceticism and monkery. It is not a vow left 
optional, as vows are left to virgins under the Papal system. 
It is a vow, a vow for life, a degrading, unwomanly vow, 
submitted to, this moment, by several thousand congrega- 
tions in the Presbyterian and Congregational communions. 
The rulers make the law, and the penalty is — excommunica- 
tion ! They who make the law stand particularly ready to 
enforce and execute it ; — Legislature, Judge, Jury, and Sheriff, 
in a breath. No power on earth can interfere. There is no 
remedy for the indignant and dissatisfied, but the old one of 
secession and schism. I need hardly say, that Episcopacy 
knows no such interference with personal liberty. As to 
such surveillance and exaction, there is not an Episcopalian 
in the wide land that would tolerate them for one hour. 

We assert, then, that in her constitution, the Episcopal 
Church is the only form of Christianity on this continent that 
is Republican and Eree. It answers fully, it answers ad- 



POPULAR LIBERTY. 



303 



mirably. to the converse of Mr. Jefferson's proposition, that 
the " accumulation of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial 
powers in the same hands, whether of few or of many, may 
be pronounced to be the very definition of tyranny.'''' And 
if this maxim of old English law, endorsed by Kent, and 
Story, and Marshall, and Madison, and Hamilton, and 
Jefferson, and the good Washington, be just : then Presby- 
terianism, in its varied forms, coincides so nearly with the 
definition, that I scarcely see room for laying down a hair 
between them. Ay, and the " tyranny" is felt. Sixty 
thousand felt it at a blow. A convenient act of legislation 
is thus converted into a judicial process ; — summary, and 
without citation, and in the absence of the parties, without a 
collateral or restraining tribunal on earth to interpose its 
checks ! No Episcopal convention in the country, no, 
nor all the assembled Bishops in the land, could so harm a 
hair of the head of the meanest layman. 

But there is another thing to be remarked. In the first coun- 
cil at Jerusalem* the legislation was conducted by " the apos- 
tles, and elders, and brethren.'''' But, in a Presbyterian synod or 
assembly, the brethren are excluded. Apostles or Bishops they 
avowedly have none. So that here is another centralization 
of power in the hands of the preaching and ruling elders alone. 
No Apostles above them, no brethren beneath them, to hold 
them in check ! No layman, mere layman, can be admitted to 
the floor, until he has been ordained an elder, and an elder 
for life. Episcopacy, both here and in England, provides that 
laymen, in the purest and most unofficial sense, shall sit in her 
legislative councils. In England, Parliament legislates as the 
Church's laity. Even Popery, in its councils, has admitted 
the laity. But in Presbytery or Methodism you must be 
at least an elder ; for otherwise you can have no more voice 
in the legislation of your church, than you have in the winds 

* Acts, xv. 



304 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



that blow above your heads. The Episcopal Church is, as far 
as we can learn, the only ecclesiastical organization on this 
continent, where laymen are represented at all. An elder, 
in the General Assembly, represents the elders, is even of 
the same grade or order (says Dr. Breckenridge) with the 
minister, and no more represents the people than does the 
minister. Even after the elders are in power, the people 
are not permitted to say which of them shall go to the 
Legislature; it is an election on the- odious borough 
system which was so intolerable in England, with the 
additional aggravation that the electors are electors for life ! 
Yet do but listen to the cry against Episcopacy, as being 
illiberal and anti-republican ! 

And I noticed yet one thing more, stamping Presbyterian- 
• ism as anti-republican ; which is, that its Legislatures con- 
vene and act as one house. In England, the Commons and 
the Peers act separately, and their action is submitted to the 
Crown. In America, the Senate and the Eepresentatives 
legislate separately, and their legislation is submitted to the 
President. In Episcopacy, there are the same three branches 
of the legislative function; the Clergy and the Laity act 
in separate orders, and their action is submitted to the House 
of Bishops : the joint aotion of the three orders being neces- 
sary to an enactment, precisely as in the case of " the Apos- 
tles, Elders, and Brethren," in the council of Jerusalem. 
But in Presbyterianism, under all its forms, there is but one 
house, and the vote is on all questions taken but once for all ; 
the " elders" are there, but neither the " apostles" nor the 
" brethren." Which then of these two is Scriptural 1 Which 
is Republican? 

And as Episcopacy, so happily settled between the two 
extremes of anarchy and despotism, reflects in her funda- 
mental law the great principles of human liberty : so, in her 
spirit and functions, there is that mixture of the liberal and 



POPULAR LIBERTY. 



305 



the conservative, so necessary to ensure the perpetuity of a 
Republic. For to bring this matter home, now that our 
Republic is careering onward in the gushing tide of her pros- 
perity, who that has eyes to see, or ears to hear, or a heart 
to fear, does not perceive that this very tide on which she 
bounds toward her destiny, may set her suddenly upon the 
rocks % 

is Republican Liberty in danger from the spirit of irrever- 
ence for authority ? What better remedy than in the teach- 
ings of the Episcopal Church, not only conservative in their 
general tone, but inculcating as a divine and fundamental 
ordinance " fear to whom fear, and honor to whom honor 
is due," and reverence for " power as ordained of God," her- 
self exemplifying in her own case this important principle 
of Christianity'? Give her the children of the land; and, . 
unlike the sects that look on division and disunion, even in 
religion, without compunction, she will train those children 
in a just reverence for authority, and in the admiration of 
unity and universal brotherhood, as being, next to redemp- 
tion, the great revelation of the second Adam, who came to 
restore the oneness and integrity of the human family. 

Or, be it that a danger to our glorious ^Republic is in the 
agitation of questions so bound up with the organization of 
society, that only the prudence of the serpent and the 
innocence of the dove can furnish their difficult and delicate 
solution : we see a fearful aggravation of the danger, not in 
reasonable and brotherly discussion, but in the well-known 
methods of Puritanism, which cannot even promote temper- 
ance without rending churches asunde^ making harsh con- 
ditions of communion, laying its hand upon the awful cup 
of the Sacrament; and which cannot reach an alms to a 
slave without shaking the land with the ostentation of its 
trumpet, and which, having no power to imitate the Divine 
forbearance, would invoke the genius of the wild storm, 

26* 



306 „ LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



to root up, in a night, trees that have been the growth of 
centuries. 

Yes, we see clouds hovering in the distance, which the 
wand of the statesman may not be able to disperse. We 
hear invectives in the North, and murmurings in the South, 
winch a Senate may not be able to conciliate. We feel a 
volcano trembling under our feet, which, if it burst, will 
blacken our bright Capitol to cinder. We see hands busy 
in designs which all Europe combined could not achieve 
against this fair Eepublic. But as the mouse, in the fable, 
gnawed the cable that had defied the strength of the lion ; or 
as the despicable worm eats through the bottom of the ship 
at anchor, which had ridden out the wildest tempest of the 
sea : so may this Republic, parting its cable, at which Puritan 
fanaticism is at this moment gnawing, and letting in waters 
from causes operating in the dark, experience what more than 
one sectarian denomination — what even strong Methodism 
has already exemplified — the separation of the North and the 
South. The Church will not divide ! You may expect it ; 
you may desire it ; a batch of Puritans or Romanizers may 
some day leave her : but by God's blessing, she will not di- 
vide ; unity is her life ; One Body, One Spirit ; and should 
she have the keeping of the hearts of the people, when the 
storm shall descend upon the deep, she will go forth as her 
Lord upon the waters, and say, Peace, be still. If any thing 
is to save this Republic, it will be Christianity. If Christi- 
anity is to retain its power, it will be by its Unity. If Unity 
is to be preserved, it will be by the Church. And perhaps 
the day may come, when the Church shall be recalled, as 
she was to England, by a people weary of the endless tu- 
mults, disunions, and exactions of Puritan fanaticism, to pour 
oil upon the waves and heal the breaches of the nation. 

No wonder that the "little one" has "become a thou- 
sand," and the indotata virgo the heir of the promise* that 



POPULAR LIBERTY. 



307 



" more are the children of the desolate than the children 
of the married wife ;" and no wonder that the Church is 
gaining and growing among the friends of liberty and order 
in the land. No wonder that the pure hearts and polished 
intellects of our most brilliant statesmen have so often 
gathered to her standard, or (since the accusation I am re- 
futing compels me to " this glorying") that in the single year 
of 1847, Chief Justice Spencer and Henry Clay, Chancellor 
Kent and Daniel Webster, all quite as competent in mind, 
and perhaps as cool in judgment, as either Dr. Potts or Mr. 
Barnes, nave, without fear of doing danger to the liberties of 
the Republic, bent their knees at the altar of the Episcopal 
Church, given her their ( allegiance, and taken the cup of 
salvation at her hand. 

The fact will bear attention, that the quiet ways of the 
Episcopal Church, her acknowledged dignity and manifest 
conservatism ; her great principle of reverence, the negation 
of which is the chief danger in republican government ; and 
her wholesome and tried stability as a solid sea-mark amid a 
sea of impulses ancLchanges, with her own interior arrange- 
ments of order, propriety, and mutual restraints, constitute the 
great desideratum, and meet the great danger, and furnish the 
solution to the great problem of Republican Liberty and 
practical Democracy : while the harmony of her worship, the 
beauty of her sanctuary, and the unity of her body, will bind 
and blend together the millions of the people. 

Although this is a subject on which we have perhaps no 
right to expect that the Bible should speak, yet we are not 
sure that the Bible has not spoken. God launched the 
Jewish nation on its new existence as a theocracy, almost 
another name for a Republic; and when, "to be like the 
nations around them," they desired a king, " he gave them a 
king in his wrath." But the great conservative element in 
that Republic while it lasted, as it was afterward the great 



308 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



check upon the monarchy, was the unity of its Church, and 
the Threefold Order of its Prelacy. This was the teaching 
of Moses ; this was the wisdom of God : and this is the 
teacliing of Episcopacy. 

But there was another view in which a manly candor 
obliged me to regard this subject. We say to the infidel, as 
he boasts the sufficiency of the light of nature, How does 
it happen that your men, who have reasoned so eloquently 
of the unity of God, the spirituality of His worship, the 
excellence of repentance, the truth of immortality, and the 
certainty of the rewards of virtue, have all of them been 
born within the pale of Baptism] Think you, if your 
Tindalls, and Humes, and Bolingbrokes, and Gibbons, and 
Collinses, and Shaftesburys had been born among their red 
brethren of the western world, under the unintercepted blaze 
of the " light of nature," they too wou]d not have been 
buried with their bows and arrows, and their hunting dogs 
and horns, to hunt in the forests of a future state, and with 
slaughtered servants to bring them wood and food and 
water in another world % We say to the infidel, Your writings 
bear too little likeness to the dreams of paganism, too strong 
a resemblance to the teachings of the Galilean Carpenter, to 
leave a doubt that you have stolen your fire from the altars 
of the Prophets, and lighted your tapers at the golden 
candlestick of the Apostles. And if the reasoning be just, 
we have equal right to say to the sectarians, Why is it that 
these embryo-empires of freedom, with which the earth is 
dotted, owe their beginnings and their being to an island in 
the sea, in which Episcopacy and Christianity have more 
power than in any portion of the globe? Why does the 
muddy Thames alone, from her unfailing urn, send forth 
these rivers of civil and religious freedom to the remotest 
lands, to make glad the wilderness 1 Why is it that a nation 
in advance of the nations, hemmed in as Palestine was to the 



POPULAR LIBERTY. 



309 



ancient election, should be the torch-bearer in the car of free- 
dom, rolling its golden circles over the western world; 
scattering from its wheels the light of liberty and progress 
over India and Burmah and China, and the East ; kindling 
the beacon fires of redemption on the dark wastes of bleed- 
ing Africa, and driving back the cannibal and savage from 
the bright havens of Australia and the Isles'? Where are 
Germany, and Prussia, and Denmark, and Holland, and 
Saxony ^ and where are their colonial monuments abroad, or 
their contributions at home, to the cause of freedom % The 
truth is, that England had been progressing for a thousand 
years in her advance "towards freedom; and the States in 
Europe had been growing rapidly into the same ideas under 
the Papacy. At the last, liberty woke from her slumbers at 
. the .Reformation ; and while, in consequence of schism and 
fanaticism, the nations on the Continent have been, ever since 
the Papacy was broken, retrograding into despotism without 
even the Papacy to hold, as it had done before; the secular 
power in check, the moderation of British Statesmen and 
Reformers secured for the world an asylum for liberty and 
for religion. Have any of the States of Germany, or Den- 
mark, or Prussia, or Saxony, or Holland, presented the 
world with a model of constitutional liberty 1 As to Switzer- 
land, it was a republic without the aid of Calvin, and has 
made little progress from that century to this. I have had 
as much trouble with my passport in Switzerland, as I had in 
Sardinia. In a colony of Denmark I have been cited to 
appear before rulers and governors, for baptizing a child of 
Presbyterian parentage ; and I have known a clergyman, not 
long before, banished from the kingdom for a similar offence. 
And when it was reported to the authorities, that some forty 
Presbyterians had applied for confirmation in my parish, I 
received timely notice that the legal penalty of their recep- 
tion, would be my banishment from His Majesty's dominions. 



310 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Civil government is nowhere more absolute than in Presby- 
terian States. Liberty dawned the second time on those 
empires a few months since, but day has receded again ; and 
liberty, in the Presbyterian portions of the continent of 
Europe, is likely to be asserted only in a terrible crisis of 
infidelity and blood. Presbyterianism having failed to make 
those nations free, Socialism and Pantheism have stepped in 
to divide her laurels. If the same wild reform that suc- 
ceeded at the Reformation on the Continent, had gotten sway 
in England, we have seen what would have been the fate of 
religion, and we may imagine now what might have been the 
fate of liberty. The only States hi Europe where human 
rights are understood and allowed, the only States in Europe, 
which, like lofty light-houses, have looked hi undisturbed 
composure on the angry and wild convulsions of the people 
in the political storm now sweeping over Europe, are Sweden 
and Great Britain ; and the only States hi Europe that have 
the primitive Episcopacy, and with it a virtual Republican 
liberty, are Great Britain and Sweden, the latter having the 
most liberal constitution and the largest liberty in continental 
Europe, allowing even its peasantry to be separately repre- 
sented in its Congress. 

So much for Episcopacy, the twin sister of human liberty. 
It were little to say, that her provisions and principles are in 
keeping with the great law of human progress ; for her pur- 
poses in the creation of a universal Brotherhood, in which 
"no man shall count any thing he has his own, as long as he 
shall see his Brother have need," are as far above the sickly, 
sentimental theories of noisy and ephemeral philanthropists, 
as the heavens are higher than the earth : and all in a sense 
and a degree which sectarianism is too narrow to grasp, and 
which the Church can hardly be expected to accomplish, until 
s the cold and shrill night-wind of schism is lulled, the waters 
of controversy have subsided, and the dove of peace shall 
brood upon the face of the deep. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 



LIBERTY OF WORSHIP. 

The reader may perhaps have heard of old Joyce Heth, 
who was exhibited in the Atlantic cities a few years ago, and 
"brought great gain to her masters, claiming to be a hundred 
and sixty years old, and to have been the nurse of General 
Washington. I saw the old woman myself, and I saw the 
documents by which her pretensions were verified ; thousands 
saw also and believed. In fact the poor old creature had 
heard the story so long, and had told it so often herself, and 
had heard so much about the documents, that she verily be- 
lieved she was a hundred and sixty years old, and had been 
the veritable nurse of General Washington ! 

Now, like our heroine, Puritanism had told, her own story 
so long, that not only had she begun to believe it herself, but 
until lately nearly every body else believed, on the strength 
of the documents, that Puritanism was the bona fide nurse 
and mother too of the great principles of civil and religious 
liberty. But the day has come, when the Pythoness herself 
begins to doubt the oracles, and they wj^o use such curious 
' arts may yet, like the writers of Ephesus, make a bonfire of 
their books. 

As a boy at school, with Morse's Geography and New 
England Eeaders to enlighten me, I could imagine a company 
of " pilgrims" landing on Plymouth Eock, amidst the howl- 
ings of the winter storms, with no earthly end in view, but 



312 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



to find an asylum for the genius of "civil and religious 
liberty." When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought 
as a child; I understood as a child. But what are the facts, 
which I know or notice now, and which I did not notice or 
know before % 

First of all, my attention was called to the fact, which as 
a schoolboy I was not allowed to know, that the " Pilgrims,'* 
who landed on Plymouth Eock, in 1620, did not sail in the 
May-Flower from "their own native England," but from 
Holland, " where (to use their own words) they did quietly 
and sweetly enjoy their church liberties" for eleven good 
years, and where those who remained, enjoyed all the liberty 
they could desire, as long as they desired it ; but where they 
soon got to be as restless as they had been in England, and, 
as a friendly writer was obliged to say, "their zeal began to 
languish for want of oppositions, and they grew tired of 
security in a place where they were without power and con- 
sequence." They came to America, no doubt, in part from 
religious motives ; but it was to establish exclusively their 
own religion. And, as to the rest, Dr. Coit (to whom I 
shall owe the principal facts embodied in this chapter) has 
adduced documents of their own, to show that the " whale- 
fisheries," and the " fisheries of the coast,"* and " the ex- 
clusive trade from Nova Scotia to the southern parts of 
Carolina," and " the entire property of the soil besides," — all 
secured by their charter from a British and Episcopal King, — 
entered about as much into their plans, as the whale fisheries 
of the North-West coast do now into the operations of New- 
Bedford Deacons, or*the gold of California into the specula- 
tions of the multitudes now suffering and perishing to reach 
that country, some to get gold, some to extend commerce, 

*The Puritans, it appears, very considerately advised their late friends, the 
hospitable Dutch, not to send their boats and ships to " the fisheries," for fear of 
capture by the Plymouth fishermen ! 



LIBERTY OF WORSHIP. 313 



some to establish a political empire, and some to find new 
dominions for the Church of God. As the eyes of the world 
are this moment turning to the El Dorado of the Pacific, so 
in those days, the eyes of -Europe were turned to America on 
the Atlantic, as the source of future wealth and aggrandize- 
ment, and the ships of all Europe were hovering about our 
coasts, as eagles gathering to their prey. It was not persecu- 
tion that drove the Pilgrims to New England. The Pilgrims 
came from Holland ; and, even in England, were not compel- 
led to belong to the Church. What, then, was the great griev- 
ance ? It was this. About two thousand ministers, and among 
them some Jesuits in disguise, entered the Church of England, 
raised the old cry of "Popery" against her forms, with a view 
to " revolutionize her," (as the Cincinnati divine I quoted in the 
early pages of this narrative, would say,) their vows of ordi- 
nation sat loosely on them, for they took them intending at 
the time to break them ; they threw aside the prayer-book, or 
mutilated and corrupted it, and sought to alter the whole 
framework of the Church ; at last discipline became necessary, 
and the intruders were required to conform to the Church 
which had recorded their vows, or else to cease from officiating 
at her altars. This was the hardship. " They felt persecuted, 
because they were not allowed to persecute." And, says the 
Presbyterian " Quarterly" of Edinburgh, " they would not 
tolerate the Church, and taught, that if princes hinder those 
who seek for the discipline, they are tyrants both to the 
Church and ministers, and, being so, may be deposed by their 
subjects; thus completely," adds the "Keview," "did Popery 
and Puritanism meet in the political deductions from their 
presumed infallibility." What they wanted, was plainly seen 
from the first ; as it occurred thirty years afterward, when 
Charles was beheaded, an archbishop martyred, ten thousand 
ministers ejected from their parishes, and throughout the 
commonwealth forbidden to teach school for their living. 

27 



314 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Persecuted out of England'? JVo, sirs! In 1629, nine 
years after the " pilgrims" left Holland for " the fisheries" 
and the " exclusive trade," and the " sole right in the soil," 
Higginson left England with a fleet of eighty guns, and with 
stores of arms, and powder, and colors, and one hundred 
planters, and, on the eve of sailing, called all hands on deck 
of the ship Talbott, and said : — " We will not say farewell, 
Babylon ! farewell, Rome ! But, we will say, farewell, dear 
England ! farewell the Church of God in England ! We do 
not go to leave England, as separatists from the Church of 
England, though we cannot but separate from its corruptions ; 
but we go to practise the positive part of church Reformation 
in America ;" and concluded his address, " with a fervent 
prayer for the King, and Church, and State, in England." 
The next year, there was another embarkation of "pilgrims" 
on board the famous Arabella, when Winthrop and a large 
party of others, for the avowed purpose of " preventing mis- 
constructions," addressed from her decks a long letter "To 
the rest of our brethren in and of the Church of England," 
in which they say, — " We desire you would be pleased to 
take notice of the principals and body of our company, as 
those who esteem it our honor to call the Church of Eng- 
land, from whence we rise, our Dear Mother, and cannot 
part from our native country, where she specially resideth, 
without much sadness of heart and many tears in our eyes ; 
ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have ob- 
tained in the common salvation, we have received in her 
bosom, and sucked it from her breasts. We leave it not, 
therefore, as loathing that milk whereby we were nourished 
there, but, blessing God for the parentage and education, as 
members of the same body, shall always rejoice in her good, 
and unfeignedly grieve for any sorrow that shall ever betide 
her, and while we have breath, sincerely desire and endeavor 
the continuance and abundance of her welfare and enlarge- 



LIBEETY OF WORSHIP. 



315 



merit." Governor Hutchinson, in his History of Massa- 
chusetts, says, " This paper has occasioned a dispute, whether 
the first settlers of Massachusetts were of the Church of 
England, or not." When Chief Justice Story quoted this 
farewell letter of the " pilgrims," in a public lecture, a few 
years since, Dr. Coit tells us that he was present himself, 
and that a good Calvinist sitting near him, suspecting some 
unfairness in this statement by the Chief Justice, (who was 
known to be a Unitarian,) turned to him with some uneasi- 
ness, and wondered whether it could be so ! Quodcunque 
ostendis sic incredulus odi. But the truth must come out. 
Authorities are consulted. Dr. Coit has found some curious 
MSS. that the world has not yet seen. Light increases. 
Stern historic truth, and that from the press of New En- 
glanders themselves, begins to take the place of platform 
speeches and blind Homeric dinner-table rhapsodies. After 
a sharp and protracted controversy, the whole world is at 
last agreed that Joyce Heth was not the nurse of General 
"Washington. 

But was it not the persecution of Archbishop Laud and 
his King that drove the Puritans from England % No ! we 
tell you, No! The Puritans emigrated to Holland in 1609, 
and to America in 1620 ; and Laud was^not archbishop until 
1633 ! As to the martyred Laud, it has been strikingly re- 
marked, that he wrote against Popery after he became a 
Bishop, but that Mr. Cotton, of New England, wrote a book 
in favor of " The power of the Keys" and of " The Bloody 
Tenet" or the right to persecute, after he became a Puritan. 
The truth is, that the non-conformists never found fault with 
the Church of England for persecuting, but for persecuting 
" the discipline." And although it was the doctrine of the age, 
that the broachers of new opinions, unsettling society and 
endangering the quiet of the people, should be willing, like 
the first Christians, to prove their sincerity by meeting the 



316 LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



penalties which society for its own safety had imposed : yet 
the Church of England used a moderation truly astonishing 
when compared with the measures of the Puritans. 

.With regard to this " freedom to worship God," which 
orators, and poets, and the Misses with the sweet guitar and 
the piano, tell us the " Pilgrims" came to establish on " the 
wild New England shore," let us look into " the documents ;" 
for, as Socrates was not above observing, " a brass kettle will 
keep its sound a long time, unless one puts Ins hand upon it 
and stops it." 

It is marvellous how the Puritans, in their abhorrence of 
Saint's days, delight to listen to the stories of the " Pil- 
grims," which have no counterpart save in the legends of 
Italian Monks recited annually to the awe-struck multitude. 
One can almost imagine certain minds in New England pre- 
pared now for the apotheosis of these heroes and " Messiahs" 
of the age, since at a New England dinner (1848) in New 
York, they endured without a shudder, the wretched toasting ; 
— " Plymouth Rock ! may it ever be, as it has ever been, 
the Bock of ages." From tins Rock the orator strikes his 
fire, and even the divine looks to it for his inspiration ; and 
in the wild delirium into winch Puritanism has run out in 
Massachusetts, the Transcendentalism and Pantheism toward 
which it is restlessly careering, who can say that Plymouth 
Rock may not yet be adored as a development of the 
Divinity that sleeps in Nature until event or accident wakens 
It to life, and makes It the source of energy and inspiration to 
the world 1 " Glorious old Rock !" " Amid the peltings of the 
pitiless storm !" " Asylum of liberty !" " Freedom to wor- 
ship God !" " Wilderness !" What a theme for the orator ! 

You have imagined, gentle reader, that, hi the " asylum" 
which the " Pilgrims" reared, a man sat down under his 
own vine and fig-tree, and worshipped God according to the 
dictates of his conscience. Long did I think so too. And 



LIBERTY OF WORSHIP. 



317 



nothing but the casting the first stone at Episcopacy, 
and my own keeping with a hearty good-will the garments 
of those who did so, put me in the way of discovering that 
the Episcopalians were " more sinned against than sinning." 
For what are the facts ? 

In England a Puritan might rail to his heart's content 
against Churchmen as " Popelings," " Papists," and " Anti- 
christs;" but in Massachusetts it cost an Episcopalian a 
flogging, to call a Puritan a Brownist, and if one spake 
" irreverently of the Lord's anointed ministers" he suffered 
fifteen lashes and was cast into a dungeon. In England the 
Puritans had thought it hard to pay tithes of property within 
the parish ; although they always bought the property at so 
much the less: but in Massachusetts, they compelled the 
Episcopalians and Presbyterians to pay taxes to Puritan 
worship, on estates in England and Scotland. Quakers were 
forced to attend their worship ; and if, after doing so, they 
met for their own worship in private, their doors might be 
broken open ; a thing, Lord Chatham said in the face of 
Parliament, the King himself could not do in England. " A 
Quaker could be apprehended without warrant, tried without 
jury, fined without mercy, incarcerated without bail, kept at 
silent labor, fastened in the stocks and in cages, exposed to 
scorn, hooting, and filthy missiles, and the disposition of his 
property rendered null and void. Men, women, and children 
could be stripped naked to the waist, stretched upon wheels, 
tied to a cart-tail, dragged through the public streets from 
town to town, and lashed as they went along, until they 
reached the limits of the settlement, where they could be set 
down and left among the wolves and bears in the howling 
wilderness ; they could be branded with the letters R. and 
H., as Rogues or Heretics ; their ears cut off, their tongues 
bored through with a hot iron ; their bodies sold into perpetual 
slavery, or hung and left unburied for the ravenous beasts." 

27* 



318 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



All this from " Pilgrims," whose greatest hardship in England, 
at the same time, was, that their ministers were not allowed 
to officiate at her altars, or to hold her livings, unless they 
would keep their vows and observe her ritual, and that their 
laity were fined one shilling if they did not attend the Parish 
church ! 

But these laws were a dead -letter, will say the kind 
reader, intended only to frighten and keep " the other de- 
nominations" quiet. No, indeed! In 1658, three poor 
Quakers had their ears cut off. In 1659, several others were 
hung, and their naked "bodies cast without covering into a 
shallow grave, and their friends forbidden to provide them 
shroud or coffin, or to deepen or fence their graves against 
the wolves. In 1661, yet others suffered, and among them 
an aged female, who was compelled to walk between two 
Quakers to the gallows, and was taunted and jeered along 
the road for the indecency, and perished amidst the hootings 
of the Puritans and the beating of their drums. And when 
the " profligate tyrant" Charles interposed the royal manda- 
mus to stay this work of persecution in_ New England, the 
prisons were found crowded with fresh victims. Yes, there 
were martyrs to the cause of religious freedom on " the wild 
New England shore," but they were not Puritans. Soon 
history will bring them forth, and the world, as Heaven has 
done before her, will set the crown of martyrdom upon their 
brow, and not upon that of their relentless murderers. 

But they were doing the same things in England, will 
say the inquiring reader % No ! a thousand times, No ! 
" The tyrant" Charles banished no Quakers, hung none of 
their preachers, confiscated none of their estates. In fact, 
the author of the " History of Maryland" declares, that " it 
will surprise the reader, at this day, after a minute search 
through the pages of the best historians of those times, when 
he finds considerable difficulty in discovering one solitary 



LIBEKTY OF WORSHIP. 



319 



instance where a Puritan was either burnt as a heretic, or 
hung as a felon, for his religion." Let it never be forgotten, 
that in 1612, the last execution in England for alleged 
religious causes took place ; and that in 1661, fifty years later, 
these sad events took place in Massachusetts. It. was in 
1661, that Leddra, a Quaker, after being chained to a log in 
an open prison through one of the coldest winters of that 
century, perished on the scaffold, appealing to God and to 
his mother country, which he reminded them knew no such 
laws, and crying with his last breath, " Lord Jesus receive 
my spirit !" Lord Brougham, albeit disposed to palliate the 
evils of Dissent, declares, that " long after the mother country 
had relinquished for ever the acts of persecution, they found 
votaries in tne constituted authorities of the Colonies ; and 
the northern States, at the end of the seventeenth century, 
exhibited the disgraceful example of that spiritual tyranny, 
from which their territories had originally served as an 
asylum." "Many," says Benedict, in his account of the 
Baptists, "were the oppressions and privations which our 
brethren suffered in this boasted asylum of liberty, until the 
American warP Not until 1834, were Church and State 
entirely separated by the Congregationalists of Massachusetts, 
or "freedom to worship God" consented to, as Eoger 
Williams, the Baptist who was banished to Rhode Island, and 
the Presbyterians and Episcopalians, desired to make it in 
1635, two hundred years before. 

When we adduce such facts, and pile them one upon 
another until they reach the clouds, the Puritan apologist 
reminds us, that " it was the fault of the times and not of 
the men," and cries, 

" O blame not, as poor Harpool's crime, 
An evil of his evil time." 

But by this claim on charity, they concede the point, and 



320 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



plead guilty to the charge of uttering & miserable fable, when 
claiming that the Puritans established in New England 
" men's right to worship God according to the dictates of 
their conscience." They never raised this cry about "the 
evil times," until over and over we had exposed the fallacy 
of their pretensions. 

But no ; Ave will not let them off with this : we have pur- 
sued them to the gates ; we now shall enter. We charge 
then, that it was the fault of the men, and not of the age in 
which they lived ; and that, in the matter of civil and religious 
liberty, the Puritans here and the Presbyterians in Europe 
were behind their times. As lately as 1700, they enacted a 
law against the Roman Catholics, of arrest without warrant, 
of perpetual imprisonment, and of death. And as lately as 
1774, they upbraided the Parliament of the mother country 
for the " Quebec Act," because it extended toleration to the 
Roman Catholics of a province, who constituted nearly its 
whole population. Nor let it be forgotten that Charles, to 
whom the Puritans gave the^ crown of martyrdom more than 
two hundred years ago, was anxious that his Parliament 
should pass an act of universal toleration, and that the 
Puritans defeated it because it would comprehend the 
Romanists. Nay, have we not seen, within the last fifteen 
years, not only the burning of convents and churches, but 
inflammatory appeals through the press, and even elaborate 
tracts and books, to prove foreign conspiracies against the 
liberties of the United States, with the avowed purpose of 
moving the government against the toleration of the Jesuits? 
So has Puritanism been ever behind the age in religious 
toleration. While New England soil was reddened with the 
blood, or blackened with the ashes of Quakers, witches, and 
Baptists, and red-hot irons might be thrust through women's 
tongues, and the cleft stick was employed to keep them still : 



LIBEETY OF WOKSHIP. 



321 



in Virginia and the Carolinas, there was felt neither fire, nor 
fagot, nor halter, nor axe, nor red-hot iron, nor even the 
cleft stick upon the tongue. And here I will turn aside to 
remind the reader that, while Presbyterians and Baptists and 
Quakers were in England free to " worship God according 
to the dictates of their consciences," the Episcopal clergy in 
Scotland were prohibited from officiating for more than four 
persons besides their own family, under penalty of six months' 
imprisonment for the first offence, and banishment for the 
second. A peer or freeholder, who attended such a service 
twice in one year, forfeited all his political rights ! The Rev. 
Mr. Erskine, of the Episcopal Church, says, under date of 
1750, " With such excessive severity were the penal laws 
exacted at this time, that Andrew Moir having neglected to 
keep his appointment at my house this morning, and follow- 
ing me to Lord Polio's, we could not take his child into any 
house, but I was obliged to go under cover of the trees into 
one of the parks, and there baptize his child." About the 
same time, or somewhat later, a young Episcopalian from 
Connecticut, on going to Edinburgh to procure a medical 
degree, requested his host, the Sunday after his arrival, to tell 
him where he mighlf find an Episcopal service or church. 
" I will show you," said his host ; " take your hat and follow 
me ; bat we are watched with jealousy by the Presbyterians ; 
do not come near me ; keep me barely in sight." So following 
his guide at a distance, through the ins and outs and windings 
of some unfrequented streets, the stranger at length saw his 
host disappear suddenly into a dilapidated building, some five 
or six stories high, on the side of a steep hill ; and following 
still the sound of footsteps into the fifth or sixth story, there 
" worshipped God according to the dictates of his conscience." 
This youth became afterward a shining light at our altars, 
and is known in our annals as Bishop Seabury — the apostle 



322 



LOOKIXG FOR THE CHURCH. 



of America.* England, Scotland — Siamese-twins : England , 
allowing "freedom to worship God;" Scotland (like Ply- 
mouth Rock — glorious old Rock !) denying it to the last ! 

But not only were the Puritans behind the Episcopalians, 
but they were behind the Romanists of their age and country, 
in the " freedom to worship God according to the dictates of 
conscience.'' Lord Baltimore and the Roman Catholics of 
Maryland, in 1642, opened their arms to the oppressed of all 
lands, and invited the Colonists of New England to settle 
freely among them, and become partakers of their liberty ; 
offering them the undisturbed enjoyment of their religion, 
at the very moment that the laws of banishment and death 
existed in New England against themselves I The invitation 
was accepted ; and what did the Northern advocates of the 
great principle of " freedom to worship God," as the poets 
and the pianos have it, do, when they were fairly warmed at 
these southern fires, to repay this hospitality 1 They served 
them worse than they had served the Dutch. They turned 
upon the hand that warmed them ; and rattled, and sprang, and 
stimg ! Maryland knew no law for imprisoning and flogging 
Quakers until then ; but with the Puritans came the law, and 
with the la w came the fact, and the fair^soil of Maryland was 
'for the first time dishonored by religious flogging. Episco- 
palians too, and even the Roman Catholics who had invited 
the Puritans among them, were now excluded from the pro- 
tection of the laws ! These are the facts, and when the world 
shall be a little older, we doubt whether the man shall be 
found whom even a New-England Dinner shall be able to 
inspire with the temerity to say, that the " Pilgrims" landed 
on Plymouth Rock with the view of erecting an asylum where 
" men might worship God according to the dictates of their 
conscience." 



* The father of Bishop Seabury was once a Congregational preacher, but crossed 
the sea to obtain a better ordination. 



LIBERTY OF WORSHIP. 



323 



Yet Edward Everett once said in an oration, (for an oration 
may sometimes have the merits of a poem, and an orator 
enjoy the poet's privilege of drawing on his imagination,) 
" Notwithstanding, we are indebted to them for two great 
principles ; one of which is the separation of Church and 
State." Now it is known to thousands of living men, that 
in Massachusetts, and at Plymouth Kock itself, Church and 
State were not entirely separated until 1834, long after every 
trace of such a connection had been obliterated and forgotten 
in every other portion of the land. Even Judge Story, a man 
whom we have already found in advance of his age and his 
neighbors, declares that " the fundamental error of our an- 
cestors, an error which began with their settlement of this 
colony, was a doctrine which has since been happily exploded, 
I mean the necessity of a union of Church and State ; to this 
they clung as to the ark of their safety." My own proud 
State, Episcopal Virginia, began her career with the right (as 
to all religious differences) of universal suffrage, whereas about 
the same time (1646) in Massachusetts, "no one could be tried, 
for life or limb, for name or estate, but by those of their own 
(Puritan) communion, and no.man in their Plantation could 
vote as a freeman, unless a member of the Congregational 
Church." Episcopalians, and the Westminster Presbyterians 
and Baptists, petitioned again and again for an equality of 
rights, or at least, that they " might be freed from the heavy 
taxes imposed upon them, and of the impressment made of 
them, their children, and their servants, into the wars." As 
late as 1739, Mr. Vinlay, a celebrated Presbyterian divine, 
was arrested and carried from town to town, as a vagrant, 
until beyond the limits of the colony ; when he went to 
Episcopal Virginia, and was permitted to preach unmolested. 
Much the same was the fate of the celebrated Mr. Tennent.* 

* Mr. Chapin says, " Puritan Massachusetts,and Puritan Connecticut had their 
.religious establishments. But Roman Catholic Maryland never had any, nor any test 



324 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



In England, if a Puritan absented himself from the parish 
church, he was fined one shilling : while at the same moment, 
in New England, if an Episcopalian were absent from Puritan 
worship, he was fined five shillings, and forty shillings a month 
for non-conformity to the Congregational Establishment ; and, 
if he were incorrigible, the law said death ! And while in 
Massachusetts the fine was five shillings, in Plymouth (glori- 
ous old Eock !) the penalty was ten ! Right truthfully hath 
it been said, " The little finger of Puritanism shall be thicker 
than the loins of Prelacy ; Prelacy hath chastised you with 
whips, but Puritanism will chastise you with scorpions." 
"Why, a man who kept Christmas or any holyday of the 
Episcopal Church, or who denied the right of the Common- 
wealth to compel attendance on Puritan worship, was fastened 
by his heels in the stocks ; and toleration was preached 
against from the pulpit, as " a sin in rulers that would bring 
down the judgment of God on the land." Judge Story says, 
"In this exclusive policy, our ancestors obstinately persevered, 
against every remonstrance, at home and abroad." Not only 
were numerous letters written them from their friends in 
England, in the first instance, " to guard against too great a 
deviation from the Episcopal Establishment," but Sir Harry 
Vane, then in England, addressed in 1645 a letter to Governor 
Winthrop, warning him against these intolerant measures, 
"lest the Congregational way teach its opponents here [in 

acts, except in the time of Cromwell. Quaker Pennsylvania never had any. 
Baptist Rhode Island never had any. Episcopal Virginia and Dutch Reformed 
New York never had any. Episcopal South Carolina and Presbyterian New Jersey 
never had any. Episcopal Virginia had a religious establishment, but it was given 
up in 1785. The principle of a religious establishment was first given up in Con- 
necticut in 1818, and in 3Iassachusetts in 1834. One cannot avoid the conclusion 
drawn by Mr. Tyson, that 'if all the colonies had been peopled by men of similar 
views and policy with those of New England, it may be doubted whether the 
Anglican form of religious freedom, now our presiding and guarding genius, had 
ever descended, to crown the happiness or bless the social charities of the pres- 
ent United States.' " 



LIBERTY OF WORSHIP. 



325 



England] to extirpate and root it out from its own principles 
and practice." Sir Richard Saltonstall wrote them an earnest 
admonition, that " these rigid ways have laid you very low 
in the hearts of the saints in England ;" to whiclr they of 
New England made answer, " God forbid our love for the 
truth should be grown so cold, that we should tolerate su^h 
errors." Judge Story says that, in 1676, five-sixths of the 
people were disfranchised by the influence in New England 
of the ecclesiastical power, and as late as 1731, the poor 
.Episcopalians were still petitioning for the right of suffrage. 

Perhaps the reader will discover, in these facts, a reason 
why Churchmen were, some of them, slower than some of 
their neighbors in siding with the Revolution. If the War 
of Independence had been against the Dutch, would any man 
have thought marvel that the Dutch ministers in New York 
should have been the last to yield to the alternative of gar- 
ments rolled in blood 1 And is it to the discredit of Episco- 
palians, that they were the last, (albeit they were often the 
first.) to take up arms agamst their brothers'? I trow not. 
And would such a fact be an ill augury for the peace of the 
Republic and the joy of the world, — if all should be henceforth 
of one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 

" Brethren in one glorious host, 
Men whose brows were bathed and crossed ?" 

And are we to deem it a discredit to the Episcopalian clergy 
that they sometimes suffered exile, and surrendered their 
livings, as the nonjurors had done before, rather than violate 
the solemn oath of allegiance taken at their ordination 1 But 
Episcopalians, it must be admitted, had good reason to fear 
that a successful revolution might reduce them to a slavery 
worse than the first. Puritanism, it must be remembered, 
was the established religion - in New England. The first 
Episcopal parish in New England dated from 1629, (a fact 

28 



326 



LOOKING FOR THE CHUECH. 



showing that the " Pilgrims" were not all " Puritans," as the 
speech on the ship Talbott and the letter from on board the 
Arabella have already indicated ;) but it was not until 1743, 
one hundred and fourteen years after, that St. Peter's in 
Salem was allowed to have an organ, and not even then, until 
the, question had been submitted to the vote of a tumultu- 
ous town-meeting ! Episcopalians knew too, that it was now 
one hundred and twenty years since Dr. Murray had been 
appointed Bishop of Virginia, — an appointment that had been 
defeated by the Puritans ; that every subsequent effort for 
the same end had been in the same manner frustrated ; that 
it was, openly avowed in the Eastern States, as one motive 
for the Revolution, that it would prevent the introduction of 
Episcopacy ; and when Episcopalians remembered that, while 
as yet under the protection of the crown itself, they had paid 
in Plymouth (glorious old Rock !) ten shillings a head for 
each absence from Puritan worship, and as lately as 1731 
had been petitioning in Massachusetts for the right of suf- 
rage, and that, fifty years after death by fire had been for ever 
abolished in England, it was still known in Boston ; when 
they recollected too, the irruption of the Puritans into 
Maryland, and the floggings that even there they inflicted on 
men's consciences, we cannot certainly affect surprise if 
some of them felt some little misgiving about the con- 
sequences of a revolution. Eranklin did something to pacify 
these fears, by declaring the opinion, in his " Cool Thoughts''' 
published before the Revolution, that " this event [the intro- 
duction of a Bishop] will happen neither sooner nor later, for 
our being, or not being, under a royal government." In spite 
of all this, there were Churchmen who felt the wrongs done 
to the colonies, and the greater wrongs done to themselves, by 
a government that had allowed the Episcopal settlements of 
the south, with all their intelligence and opulence, to be 
deprived of the Episcopacy and their essential apostolic 



LIBEKTY OF WOESHIP. 327 



character, for now a hundred and fifty years. And if the 
North furnished for that Revolution the iron, the South con- 
tributed the tow and the fire ; and while Washington, nursed 
at the Church's breasts, kindled in the camp the fires on his 
country's altar, the Venerable White, chaplain to the first 
Congress and afterward Bishop of Pennsylvania, kindled in 
the same cause, the fires on the altars of his country's God. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



LIBERTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 

There is, as I have shown in a former place, a species of 
liberty, so called, which Presbyterianism originally had no 
intention to encourage, but to which, in her downward tend- 
encies, she inevitably conducts ; and against which, as Anti- 
christian, Episcopacy irreconcilably protests. She protests 
against levelling down the sublime mysteries of religion to 
the intellectual grasp of every sewing girl; every text of 
Scripture to the exegesis of the washerwoman; the Church 
of God to the dignity of a temperance society ; the Priest- 
hood to an office made and unmade by the hands of men ; 
Government to a social compact that parties may dispense 
with at their will ; Sacraments to a place beneath the mystery 
and power of masonic symbols ; the ancient severities of re- 
pentance to a spasmodic agitation, lasting sometimes not an 
hour^ the majesty of divine worship to a weekly off-hand 
prayer: and a thousand like things, that strive to leap the 
intellectual space between finite and Infinite, strike at the 
crown of Jesus, and sink the redeeming God into a feeble 
man. Saint Peter and Saint Jude, in concert, warn us 
against " dreamers," that should come " in the last time," or 
under the last dispensation, who, having "denied the Lord 
that bought them," shall " despise government, and shall not 
be afraid to speak evil of dignities ;" who, " with feigned words 



LIBERTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 



829 



make merchandise of men," " waves of the sea, wells without 
water, clouds carried about by the winds, wandering stars," 
"speaking great swelling words of vanity," "murmurers, 
complainers, promising men liberty."* " Religious liberty," 
as the phrase is, and as some men count liberty, is not the 
liberty of religion, but the liberty of irreligion, to assert 
itself, and obtrude itself into all places and companies with 
its whole execrable brood of profane and licentious fancies. 
The moment you call it to order on the score of reverence, 
or of common decency, you are considered as impertinently 
interfering with religious liberty ; so that, in portions of our 
land, in companies where the reverence and deference of 
Catholicity are out of the question, in the stage-coach, at the 
hotel, at the dinner-table, in the ship at sea, one can scarcely, 
in mixed companies, get through the day without submitting 
to undue and ill-mannered flings at the dearest object of his 
faith and hope. One has said, that " if you wish to think a 
little, you may be an Episcopalian ; if you wish to think a 
little more, you may be a Presbyterian ; if you wish to 
think a little more, you should be a Congregation alist ; and 
if you wish to think as much as you please, you must be a 
Unitarian." Now this chain itself indicates the power of 
thinking ; and yet, poor man ! if he would but " think a little 
more" he will see, that of this stuff the infidel, pantheist, athe- 
ist, may each one weld and add his potent link to this por- 
tentous chain ! " Having heard that it is a vastly silly thing 
to believe every thing, some persons get the idea that it is a 
vastly wise thing to believe nothing." 

Reason is the mind's eye or telescope, for the perception 
of truth ; nor is it any more necessary that the mind should 
comprehend the truth perceived, than that the mountains or 
the stars should be compressed into the lenses of the eye or 
of the telescope. The medium through which reason discov- 

See Jude and 2 Pet. ii. 

28* 



330 



LOOKING FOR THE CHTJECH. 



ers truth, is light — the light of nature, and the light of reve- 
lation ; but reason can no more create these lights, than the 
eye or the telescope can create the light of day. In the 
truths that reason arrives at by the light of nature, we travel 
from link to link along the chain, until we come into indi- 
vidual contact with the conclusion: in the truths that we 
perceive by revelation, we skip the chain ; we bound across 
the intervening gulf ; we see the bright object in the heavens ; 
we admire ; we adore ; we have no means of reaching it. The 
Christian religion descends upon the earth. It finds reason on 
the throne, and demands her allegiance. Produce your cre- 
dentials, replies the haughty mistress. If I do not works, none 
other ever did ; if I speak not words, none other ever spake ; 
if I live not a life, none other ever lived ; if I die not the 
death, none other ever died ; if I rise not again as none other 
ever rose ; if I ascend not to heaven to show that from heaven 
I came ; believe me not : is the answer. Reason until your 
heads shall burst, to prove that I am to be believed at all ; 
then yield me up the right to say for you, what you are to 
believe and what you are to do. Let the child reason its 
little self to death, to know whether this is the mother that 
bare him ; although a mother's voice and hovering love will, in 
the very dark, strike conviction to its heart : but once having 
satisfied itself that she is its mother, let it honor her with 
faith and obedience to the death. Reason, if you will, till a 
thousand suns go down, whether the heavenly Jerusalem, 
" the Lamb's wife," " the Mother of us all," is the " Faithful 
and True Witness" left by Jesus upon earth to " fill up that 
which is behind" of His teachings and His sufferings : then 
follow Her, to the prison and the cross. Reason if you 
please, till the lamps of night expire, that it is safer to be- 
lieve what the universal church of God believes, than to 
imagine that your own unaided reason can decide where all 
the individual reasons round you differ .and have differed 



LIBERTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 331 



ever; or reason, if you please, until the world grows old, 
to prove that it fs more likely that God's guiding Spirit 
would "lead into all truth" the universal company of His 
elect, than that He should send that Spirit to guide you 
alone into the truth, when you have cast yourself on the 
ocean of conflicting doctrines with the rash hope that a mira- 
cle would interpose to save you ! Yes, saith the Church ; 
reason at the threshold : but let it be once for all. Estab- 
lish the claim ; let faith and obedience follow. Be not for 
ever learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the 
truth. Do not reason, and reason, and reason, against each 
article and particle, and fight every inch of your unwilling 
way to heaven, and look to " irresistible grace" to force you 
on. Establish the mother's claim ; you can know Her by 
Her voice and very look, for they speak to the heart : let 
► reverence follow. There is truth in the saying, 

" Quand l'homme commence a raisonner, il cesse de sentir," 

as a child that will reason and face down his parent at every 
trivial turn, will shortly cease from reverence, obedience, and 
filial affection. I would not for a universe of gold risk my 
salvation on the deduction of my " private judgment," unless 
I could be sure of the repetition for my benefit of the alleged 
Alexandrine miracle. The Jews have a tradition that when 
the Seventy in Egypt translated the Old Testament into 
Greek, for their brethren who had lost the Hebrew tongue, 
each translator was immured for a long period in a private 
cell, and when the seventy-two translators at the expira- 
tion of the time were brought together, it was found that, 
word for word, they had all by divine guidance made the 
same exact translation. Now if earnest and devout men 
could come forth from their closets where they expect indi- 
vidual guidance, and speak the same thing, even on the awful 
question of the Divinity of Jesus, and on the thousand ques- 



332 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



tions in which individualism has split them up, we might 
believe that like the Seventy they were glided by one Spirit. 
But they differ ; they for ever differ ; they differ world-wide. 
One makes Jesus a man ; another makes Him a God : one 
brings infants to His blessing ; another keeps them back : and 
so they differ and will differ ever. Sooner would I this night 
leap from the vessel's decks into the boiling sea, in the expec- 
tation that in answer to prayer I might drift safely to shore : 
than plunge from the floorings of the Heavenly Ark, into a 
wild sea of sects, and expect Him to uphold me in the waves. 

O, I have seen men's heads reel, and their feet stagger, and 
their bones wrecked along my path, from this intoxicating 
doctrine, and I thank God that He has put strength into 
my arm to fling from me for ever this cup of sorceries and 
sorrows. I have seen the mischief it has done. I do well to 
be heart-broken and angry. I have had many dear ones in 
life, whom tears cannot recall from the grave, whose feet have 
slidden on these slippery places. I have trodden over the 
dark sepulchre of millions, as I have shown before, who in 
the intoxicated hour have lost all upon the giddy wheel of 
" private judgment." I will not taste the cup. I see reasons 
to make me fear. When Cyrus was a boy, acting one day 
the part of cup-bearer to his grandfather Astyages, it was 
observed that, before handing the cup to the king, the little 
fellow did not taste the wine. " You forgot to taste it !" said 
the king. "No," said the child, "but I was afraid there 
might be poison in the cup ; for whenever the lords of your 
court drink from it, I see that they become noisy and quar- 
relsome, and even yourself when you drink, forget that you 
are a king !" How can we say, Drink freely, drink deeply, 
when we see the whole ultra-Protestant world either " noisy 
and quarrelsome," for ever disputing and wrangling, or else 
slumbering its death-sleep after its excesses? I have seen 
another story that may illustrate this danger : — " The Caliph 



LIBEETY OF PEIVATE JUDGMENT. 333 



of Bagdad having lost his way in the chase, and entered the 
hut of an Arab in a fainting state, the latter deemed it an 
occasion when he might transcend the requisitions of the 
Koran, and set wine before his guest. Mahadi did not hesi- 
tate to drink, and soon began to tell his host that he was one 
of the chief servants of the Caliph, and would not forget his 
hospitality. Whereupon the attentions of his host were re- 
doubled ; and Mahadi having again drank freely of the wine, 
began presently to say, ' I must tell you, my friend, confiden- 
tially, that I am the favorite of the Caliph's household, and 
in return for your kindness, he will load you with his favors.' 
The wild Arab, now kissing the seam of his guest's robe, set 
all the luxuries of his hut before him, and begged him not to 
spare the wine if he found it to his taste. By degrees, Ma- 
hadi ceased to require pressing, and taking the old Arab's 
hand, said to him, ' My good friend, in wine is truth, and 
your hospitality obliges me to confess to you, that I am the 
Caliph himself, and as Caliph I confirm to you the promises 
I have made.' The child of the desert now took up the wine 
and marched towards the door. 'Where are you going?' 
asked the Caliph ; ' I am going to remove the wine,' said the 
son of the desert ; 1 for after the first draught you said you 
were a servant of the Caliph ; at the second, you were his 
confidential favorite ; at the third, you were the Caliph him- 
self; now I know not what to believe ; but I fear, if you 
should drink again, you will declare that you are our Great 
Prophet !' " Alas ! the stripling Cyrus and the wandering 
Bedouin saw, from the same cause, the same effect. And 
how many millions, since the intoxicating cup of private 
judgment was put into their hands, with the wild Arab, may 
say, " / know not what to believe ;" first, Jesus was God ; 
then he was an eternal emanation from God ; then he was a 
creature higher than the angels, and created before them; 
then he was one of the angels ; then he was nothing more 



334 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



than man. First, the Bible was inspired ; then only a por- 
tion of it was inspired ; then only the words of Jesus were 
inspired ; then there was no inspiration at all. Once Jesus 
was alone Messiah ; now He was but one of a succession of 
Messiahs, who have already appeared, or are yet to come. 
First, there were three that bare record in heaven; then 
there was but One ; now there is None, save the Spirit of 
Nature, whose highest development is Man ; and the appre- 
hension of the Arab that his guest would declare himself next 
the Great Prophet himself, has had its terrific counterpart in 
the discovery, that Man is the highest impersonation of the 
Divinity of Nature waking into consciousness ; and that while 
every thing else is God hi its degree, Man is the God of gods. 
Thus with its unbounded " right of private judgment," Pres- 
byterianism, where its course is run, has torn up the founda- 
tions of Christianity ; and the whole Protestant world, seeking 
one negation after another, is now reduced to the condition 
of the child of the desert, — " 1 "know not what to believe." 
There is no Mother to teach ; faith is at an end; reverence is 
no more ; unity is gone ; the great business of the sanctuary 
is supplanted ; and where the Regulator is wanting, 

" 'Tis with our judgments as our -watches, none 
Go just alike, yet each believes his own." 

As there are men in the state who imagine that it interferes 
with their liberty, to be obedient to law ; as there are men in 
society who think it an interference with their liberty, to be 
compelled to maintain their offspring ; as there are parents 
who think it an interference with their children's liberty, to 
teach them the fear of the Lord ; as there are ruined youths 
who have thought it an interference with their liberty, to be 
required to obey their parents ; as there are men who deem 
themselves not free, so long as government and property are 
in their way : so among Christians there are men who deem 



LIBERTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 335 



it an interference with their liberty, to be bound by the uniform 
voice of the Church. I can almost imagine that, in the hands 
of a Genevan watchmaker, a thousand watches might be set 
going without a regulator, and all practical utility be sacrificed 
to the singular caprice, that it would interfere with their liber- 
ty to put it in their power to go right. A man is held not to 
be free, if he believes the truth : and by parity of reasoning, 
a man is not free, who is compelled to believe that three times 
three are nine ; nor a mathematician free, who cannot escape 
the fact, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two 
right angles ; nor a Christian free, unless he be allowed to 
deny and betray his Master ; nor a Catholic free, unless he 
can be brought to depend more on his own private judgment 
as to what was taught in the Church eighteen centuries ago, 
than on the testimony of that Church herself ! This world is 
a probation for the passions ; ought it not consistently to be 
a probation for the reason % There are men who teach, that 
if you will but read the Bible and seek God's aid by prayer, 
He will infallibly guide you into all truth ! But the first 
thing we notice is, that God has punished your temerity by 
distracting you amidst a thousand conflicting doctrines, and 
has punished his own child by leaving him to doubt — yes, 
since they would not believe the testimony of His Church, 
leaving millions to deny — the Divinity of His Son ! Can any 
man believe, that He who never gives a stone when His child 
asks bread, would suffer this, if this teaching were true 1 Does 
it not rather look like the only method left in the wisdom of 
God, to bring a distracted world back to the teaching of the 
Church : precisely as He left the heathen of old to stumble on, 
and feel the insufficiency of reason, and the necessity of a 
Revelation, before He gave it ? Here the Mother of us all — 
the Lamb's Bride — steps forth, and, protesting against the 
harlot's words of flattery with which the heart of her child 
might be too easily seduced, cries, My child, the waters 



336 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUECH. 



are deep, and the storm is wild; the wind is high, and 
the night is dark ; the sea is covered with the wrecks, and 
your bark is frail : stay, stay, my child, within the ark, and 
take your portion with its ransomed ones ; " lean not unto 
thine own understanding ; for it is not in man that walketh 
to direct his steps." 

If order be incompatible with liberty; if reverence be 
irreconcilable with freedom ; if obedience be derogatory to 
the dignity of human rights : then is Episcopacy now and 
for ever at war with liberty. If it be slavery to believe what 
is true ; if it be slavery to chain the passions in arriving at 
conclusions ; if it be slavery to do studied and formal homage 
to the Parent whose goodness is equal to His power ; if it be 
slavery to obey the powers that are ordained of God ; if it be 
slavery to listen to a Witness who was there from the begin- 
ning : then is the true Catholic a slave. 

But no ! In this sad world where man by sin has forfeited 
so much, it is well to remember there are divinely chartered 
liberties and rights, which the Church only hath preserved, 
and which Presbyterianism has now many a day trampled 
under foot. Episcopacy in her first synod at Jerusalem had 
elders — and she has them still — apostles, and brethren : 
Presbyterianism concentrates all in one order, and has ex- 
cluded both the apostles and the laity. Episcopacy, even in 
monarchical England, has a branch of her legislature in a 
Parliament of laymen : Presbyterianism, in republican Ameri- 
ca, admits no laymen to her councils. Episcopacy distributes 
the three powers of government, Executive, Judicial, and 
Legislative, as the forms of constitutional liberty require : 
Presbyterianism consolidates them in one. Presbyterianism 
attempts to bind her followers by a confession of faith so ex- 
tended, that it covers the whole ground in divinity with fine- 
spun dogmas, and leaves no room for innocent diversities of 
judgment ; so that when diversities arise, the body explodes : 



LIBERTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 337 



all this, Episcopacy affirms, is imphilosophical, unscriptural, 
unprimitive, incompatible with the variety of men's minds 
and modes of thinking, and an insufferable abridgment of hu- 
man liberty ; and she gives you, instead, her simple and 
ancient Creed, which can be written on your thumb-nail, and 
tells you that for the rest you may believe salva fide as you 
please ; and whereas Presbyterianism may lengthen, or 
shorten, or alter, or amend its creeds to-morrow, the Church 
guaranties to you the ancient Charter, and tells you that no 
bishop nor nation of bishops upon earth can any more make 
a Creed, than they can make a Bible, or a God. Strict Pres- 
byterianism teaches you, that you are by nature fast bound 
in misery and iron ; that a decree of Omnipotence holds you ; 
that you can no more reverse your destiny, than you can re- 
verse the poles : the Church touches your fetters, and they 
fall ; and as she bids you go and work out the destiny that 
under a Covenant of universal Grace brightens in the distance, 
" Hark ! the roused captive spurns his heavy load, 
And asks the image back that Heaven bestowed ; 
"Warm in his heart the glow of freedom burns, 
And as the slave departs, the man returns." 

Presbytery teaches you that there are millions of such 
captives, for whom Christ never died : the Church says, Away 
with the un-Godlike thought, by which ye cause our " brother 
to perish for whom Christ died." Presbytery insists, that the 
Holy Ghost, in His saving acts, is imparted only to the elect: 
the large-hearted Church cries out, in the language of the 
Apostles, " Repent, and be baptized every one of you for the 
remission of sins, and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost." 
Presbytery leaves little to an enlightened and generous con- 
science, but by a vast system of exaction and surveillance, 
extending even to drinks and dress and social recreations, is 
an omnipresent task-master, binding burdens that Episcopa- 
lians would feel degraded to carry for a moment : but the 



338 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUKCH. 



Church, substituting for this " love of law" Her " law of love," 
throws an enlightened and generous conscience with free- 
breathing, unaffected ease, upon the great Christian principles 
in which it has been reared. Presbyterianism seals up your 
lips in the house of God, and suffers you to be only a silent 
listener in the high act of worship : the Church unseals your 
lips, and restores you, not in poetic fiction and sentimental 
song, but in delightful fact, " the freedom to worship God." 
Presbytery, shutting up the wounds which Christ left open, 
and from which gushed forth not the blood only, but the 
blood and water, takes away the birthright of your child if 
you have sinned, and bids it begone from the waters where 
its birth-sin may be washed away : the Church, like a gentle 
mother, says, " Bring thy son hither ; it is the purest sacrifice 
the wide earth now has to lay upon the altar ; I baptize him 
in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy 
Ghost ; and I charge you to remember that henceforth he is 
a child of God, a member of Christ, and an inheritor of the 
kingdom of heaven." Presbyterianism next gives over even 
the child it has baptized, to the tender mercies of the world, 
until it may please God by his "irresistible grace" to bring 
back the prodigal : but the Church, like the rightful mother, 
will not thus wrong and rob the child of Her womb ; but 
with affectionate solicitude recalls it to her altar, to be con- 
firmed in its bright inheritance, and receive on its young head 
and heart the baptism of Her second blessing. And in the 
hour of death, when the powers of darkness hover around and 
make their last dread effort with you, and when Presbytery 
listens coldly to your cry, " I thirst ;" and, less merciful than 
the heathen soldiers at the cross, refuses to touch your lips 
with the wine and myrrh : the gentle Mother is by your bed, 
wiping with Her napkin the death-sweat from your brow; 
and, giving you the heavenly supper, leaves you with a sweet 
" Good-night !" to close your eyes upon the world. 



LIBERTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 339 



That, as Presbyterians, you may not have observed the 
gradual steps whereby these encroachments on your liberties 
have been established, or that you are now insensible to the 
loss, one after another, of your rights secured to you once in 
the ancient Charter of the Church, only adds melancholy force 
to a melancholy fact. You have worn the chains so long that 
you do not feel them ; and in this respect you are in the con- 
dition of the Papist, who does not care for the " liberty" to 
read the Scriptures, the " right" to receive the cup in the Holy 
Eucharist, or the "freedom" to worship God in a language he 
can understand. 

Thus was I dislodged from my position, Number One, in 
which I had fortified myself at Princeton ;* and these were the 
obvious reasonings that drew me on toward a Church, at once 
Catholic- — Reformed — and Free; itself the best solution I 
could find of the mighty problem, of which the terms are 
Law and Liberty — Obedience and Freedom. 

* See page 43. 



CHAPTER XX. 



HYPOTHESES. 



I came now to the question of the Episcopacy. Some have 
employed their pens upon it, appearing to deem it the main 
matter at issue between the Church and the sectarians. Al- 
ready I have said that I do not so regard it. We think that 
truth, grace, redemption, are all equally in peril; and the 
crown of our Lord's Divinity, and the blessed Mystery of His 
Cross, are wildly hazarded upon the die. I have sufficiently 
detailed the facts which too well support this terrific charge. 

But, if the chaff be necessary to defend the unripe grain 
from blight and frost ; if the rind be necessary to contain the 
mellow juices of the fruit, and advance them to maturity ; if 
the shell be necessary to preserve the kernel from decay ; if 
the body be necessary to retain the soul, and be the channel 
of her functions while doing her errand in this terrestrial 
sphere ; if, in a word, Eternal Wisdom has imposed upon 
Itself a uniform law to protect every thing in nature with a 
covering, and to lock up the life of every thing inexplicably 
in its appropriate corporeal form : then is Christianity a ration- 
al and philosophical reflection of the Divine Wisdom, only 
when it holds in indissoluble union the Spirit with the Letter, 
the Grace with the Sacraments, the Promises with the Priest- 
hood, the Eealities with the Symbols, the Gospel with the 
Church. With this explanation, therefore, Episcopalians be- 



HYPOTHESES. 



341 



Keve that, as the Church is essential to the preservation of the 
Faith, so is the Episcopacy essential to the preservation of the 
Church. 

The broad fact stared me in the face that, certainly at a 
very early age, the Church was in all places under an Episco- 
pacy. In Palestine and Syria, in Armenia and India, in 
Greece and Italy, in France and England, in Spain and Africa, 
from Antioch to Canterbury, from Asia Minor to Abyssinia, 
over three continents, and in all the islands of the sea, the 
Church was everywhere Episcopal. It was the age of piety, 
the age of miracle, the age of martyrdom, while the kiss of 
peace yet bore witness to the heart's purity, and the saints in 
humility stooped down and washed each other's feet. Yet in 
this age of truth and danger, there was, in every city and 
island and town, one, and one only, who was known as the 
chief pastor or bishop of the place. We never read in 
antiquity of more than one such person in a city at a time : 
James in Jerusalem ; Clement in Rome ; Ignatius in Antioch ; 
Polycarp in Smyrna ; Irenaeus in Lyons ; surrounded by their 
Presbyters and Deacons. And when the fires of martyrdom 
blazed high and bright, there was in every city and town one, 
known alike to Christian, Jew, and Pagan, as the chief shep- 
herd, who must first unbind his girdle and lay down his life 
for the flock. Thus, in defiance of considerations almost 
enough to have extirpated Episcopacy from the Church, unless 
it had been an ordinance of Christ which they durst not violate, 
or even for a time conceal : Episcopacy existed wherever the 
Church existed, and the world has been again and again chal- 
lenged to produce one single church in all Europe, Africa, or 
Asia, which in the first, the second, the third, the fourth, the 
fifth, or the sixth century, was for one moment Presbyterian. 
"When Presbyterians demand of Episcopalians a chain of 
Bishops from 1850 back to the days of the Apostles : Episco- 
palians produce it — link after link, name after name— back 

29* 



342 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



to the hands of St. Thomas in Syria, St. John in Ephesus, 
St. James in Jerusalem, St. Mark in Alexandria, St. Peter 
and St. Paul at Rome. But when Episcopalians ask of 
Presbyterians to produce, not a succession of churches reach- 
ing beyond Luther and Calvin and a gulf of a thousand years, 
but one poor, single, solitary church in a world-full of Churches, 
that in the first, or the second, or the third, or the fourth, or 
the fifth century, was bona fide Presbyterian : they return the 
writ with the non est inventus ; it cannot be found ! 

I recollect well that, with this view of the matter, I began 
to suffer an uneasiness that subsequent investigations served 
only to increase. It struck me forcibly, as'arguing the Apos- 
tolic origin of Episcopacy, in the same manner that the uni- 
versal worship of Jesus, in the earlier ages, demonstrates His 
Divinity. It is distinctly in my memory, that the Professor 
of Theology, at Princeton, introduced a brilliant Lecture on 
the Divinity of Christ, with these words : " It is a strong pre- 
sumptive proof of the Divinity of Christ, that the Church 
Catholic has held it from the earliest ages." Now we require 
but the mutato nomine to say : " It is a strong presumptive 
proof of the Apostolic origin of the E}nscopacy^ that the 
Church Catholic has held it from the earliest ages." Nay, in 
favor of Episcopacy, the argument, like the testimony that 
supports it, is unbroken : whereas, in its application to our 
Lord's Divinity, the Unitarian exultingly adduces the Ebion- 
ites of the first century, the swarming sects of Gnostics in the 
second, and the mighty multitudes of Arians in the third and 
fourth, all crying out against the doctrine as an innovation or 
corruption. Could Presbyterians produce, in favor of their 
pretensions, one tithe of the outcry in the first four centuries 
against Episcopacy, that Unitarians can produce against the 
claim in the same centuries of our Lord's Divinity : they 
would make the land ring again with the protest and the 
clamor that Episcopacy had thus elicited in the first, second, 



HYPOTHESES. 



343 



third, and fourth centuries. But, on the subject of Episco- 
pacy, there is no clamor. There is not a voice . to break the 
silence. The Christian world reposes for at least three un- 
broken centuries of piety, miracle, and martyrdom, under the 
undisputed watch and rule of the Episcopacy. This was the 
phenomenon ; and, by attempting to account for it, Presbyte- 
rians acknowledged it. 

One of my earliest misgivings in this matter, was a secret 
and increasing dissatisfaction with the prevailing explanation 
of this phenomenon, among the Presbyterians around me, 
and their singular method of accounting for " the rise and 
growth" of Prelacy in the primitive Church. It would not 
have answered to suppose, that it was introduced violently 
into the Church, or in any great degree against the wishes of 
the people or the clergy : for the absence of all clamor or out- 
cry, or even notice of the event, precludes the hypothesis. 
When the Bishop of Rome usurped but the smallest begin- 
nings of power unknown to the pre-existing church, the w T hole 
East cried out in a rebuke of thunder ; a standard that was 
never struck, was raised against him in Bohemia and the 
Alps ; every nation in Europe contested, for a while, the grow- 
ing usurpation ; France would not submit, but on conditions 
that to this day are dear to the Gallican Church ; even Austria 
and Spain protested loudly and long ; while England surren- 
dered last, and to the last retained much of her ancient inde- 
pendence, and in fact never, formally and legally, by authori- 
tative act of either Church or Parliament, surrendered to the 
domination of Rome. The smallest change in ecclesiastical 
administration is sure to be noted on the pages of the fathers. 
Scarcely can a bell-ringer or a candle-snuffer, a sub-deacon or 
an acolyte, be introduced to complete the service of the sanc- 
tuary : that the event and the date are not set down in history. 
Yet, if the Apostles left the Church on three continents Pres- 
byterian, not only did it become Episcopal in one hundred 



344 



LOOKIKG FOE THE CHURCH. 



years over the entire world : but not a writer of antiquity has 
told us when or where, or by what means the change took 
place, or who effected it, or that such a change took place at 
all. When or where was it that some tall commanding in- 
tellect arose, and, setting one foot on the sea and one on the 
dry land, with a voice that reached and overturned three 
continents and shook the islands of the sea, lifted his hand and 
said, Wherever Apostolic Presbyterianism hath been, there let 
a human Episcopacy be hereafter ? Pair must have been his 
form, winning must have been his countenance, and sweet 
must have been the music of his tongue, methinks, to persuade 
three continents at once, and at one stroke, to destroy an in- 
stitution so lately left them by the inspired Apostles, and at 
the same time to agree throughout the world that not one 
word should be said about the matter, either to extenuate it, 
to account for it, or so much as to record it ! Presbyterian- 
ism, child of the Apostles, and first love of the martyrs, 
nurtured and held dear wherever the feet of the Apostles trod, 
died, and was buried, and neither foe nor mourner on the 
earth either shed a tear or exulted at its death, or raised a 
slab to say to the passer-by how long it lived, or when or 
where it died ! This was a fact that embarrassed me much, 
so soon as I was brought by other causes to a state of mind 
that compelled me to lend it my attention. When, in the 
sixth century, Rome sent Augustine and his companions into 
England to convert the Anglians, they found a Church in her 
beauty, using the ceremonial of the Oriental Christians, 
claiming parentage from the successors of St. John; also 
tracing her annals to the very person of St. Paul, and adorned 
with a hierarchy that, two or three centuries before, had sent 
its Prelates to the councils of Aries, Sardica, and Ariminum. 
When Buchanan made his journeys to the East, he found in 
the clefts of the rocks and the fastnesses of Syria, the remnant 
of the disciples of St. Thomas, a simple and frugal flock, 



HYPOTHESES. 



345 



claiming descent from Israel according to the flesh, for thirteen 
centuries cut off from the Christian world: but hugging to 
their hearts a beautitul liturgy, erecting the simple cross upon 
the altar as the sufficient expression of their faith, evincing 
their ancient and Jewish origin by retaining the thank-offer- 
ings, the sacrificial lamb, and the circumcision of the J ews, 
and having and holding in reverence the order and office of 
the Bishops. When Dr. Wolff, whose benevolence in seek- 
ing the outcast races of the earth has been equalled only by 
his courage in conquering the obstacles that resisted his will, 
and who has exemplified the self-denial of the Gospel as few 
have illustrated it since the fathers and Apostles of his race 
first fell asleep, was led to remark that, in the whole circuit of 
his travels, Greek or Armenian, Coptic or Syrian, every thing 
Christian and bearing traces of antiquity, had everywhere its 
triune priesthood of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons: it sug- 
gested a thought that ripened into conviction, and led him 
like a child, though late in a career of usefulness and fame, 
to seek a Deacon's Orders at a Bishop's hands. In fact, Epis- 
copacy needs no other argument than its universality, at a 
time and in circumstances that make that universality a sim- 
ple impossibility if, at the death of St. John, the Universal 
Church was Presbyterian. 

But something must be done ; if we let it thus alone, the 
world will go after it; in the absence of any outcry or 
remonstrance, or even record of the overthroAV of Presbyteri- 
anism, can we not follow up the supposition that it was over- 
thrown, by another supposition, that shall explain to the 
people how it was overthrown % Yes, say the scribes and 
champions of Presbytery, a happy thought now strikes us; 
let our soldiers and fighting men say, when questioned closely 
by the people about the disappearance of the Presbytery, and 
of its sepulchre, and of the stone that marked the place where 
it lay : that while the Presbyterians slept, the Episcopalians 



346 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



came somewhere in the darkness, between the first and fifth 
centuries, and stole it away ! And the thing happened on 
this wise. The Moderators of the Presbyteries, through 
compliment to their discretion, piety, or age, were permitted 
to hold their office from one sitting to another ; at length the 
office came to be considered permanent ; until at last, these 
" Standing Moderators" took the name of Bishops, while the 
rest of the clergy were notified to keep the name of Presby- 
ters; and what occurred at Eome, occurred at Alexandria; 
and what happened at Alexandria, happened at Canterbury ; 
and in fact, every city and town on the three continents pre- 
sented the same phenomenon. But where it began, and when 
it occurred, we have no means of knowing, for we tell you 
that the thing took place while the Presbyterians slept ! This 
is the supposition of Doctor Miller. As a student at Prince- 
ton, I as innocently believed as though I had seen it with 
my eyes, that could I have time to go into the libraries of 
the Seminary, and to turn over the folios of the fathers that 
lie there in undisturbed repose and dust, each with its virtual 
inscription, Requiescat in 2^ace, I should have seen, on many a 
page of earliest antiquity, a venerable company of pastors 
sitting in Presbytery with supreme and equal jurisdiction, 
and a "Standing Moderator" putting the question simulta- 
neously to every church under the sun, " As many of you as 
agree to the resolution, that I shall hereafter be invested with 
the title and prerogative of Bishop, while the rest of you 
shall be my Presbyters, will signify it by saying, — Ay ; and 
they of the contrary will say — No ;" and that all the Pres- 
byteries throughout the world, from Tartary to England, and 
from Abyssinia to Asia "Minor, gave their voices in the af- 
firmative ; and came to a second resolution, that none of their 
historians or writers should ever say one word about Pres- 
byterian parity, or so much as let posterity know that it had 
ever existed : this, perhaps, for the honor of Presbytery, which 



HYPOTHESES. 



347 



had worked badly, and which they would bring under the 
motto, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. Imagine, then, my 
surprise, on finding that all this was supposition, without the 
shadow of historical authority, and that the Fathers do not 
say one word about Moderators, standing or sitting, temporary 
or permanent. These " Standing Moderators" are a standing 
proof, therefore, of the fertility of the imagination, when 
roused by the necessities of the case to a particularly striking 
effort. The universality of Episcopacy, and the universal 
silence over which it reigns, are awkward facts to deal with ; 
and though we may wonder that some better hypothesis has 
not come to the relief of Presbytery, yet, on reflection, it will 
be seen that this is as rational, perhaps, as any other that 
could have been invented. I shall never forget the embar- 
rassment of a fellow-student at Princeton, and the mirth he 
created for his class at one of their recitations, when the Pro- 
fessor asked him whether the story of the Jews about the 
disappearance of the Body from the sepulchre was not very 
lame : and asked him further, whether he did not think they 
might have gotten up a better story ? "I think they might," 
said the youth. " Well, what would you have said V asked 
the Professor, whose playful manner by this time indicated 
that the catechumen was getting among the breakers. There 
was an awful pause; the poor young man (albeit certainly 
not under thirty) could scarcely maintain his perpendicularity 
in the midst *of his dilemma, but throwing his weight first on 
one leg, and then on the other, and seeming to feel very du- 
bious himself whether he was on his legs at all, at length, 
by a peculiar conformation of his countenance, made signal to 
his class that the Jew had fairly outwitted the Gentile, and 
had told the best story that the case admitted of. 

But this hypothesis of the Presbyterians is lame in another 
particular. It does not account for the disappearance of the 
" ruling elder," or for the acquisition by the Deacons of the 



348 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



right to baptize and preach. For herein, said I, is a marvel- 
lous thing : one Presbyter in every city in Christendom gets 
to be Bishop; and two other results, requiring contrary 
causes to produce them, simultaneously take place ; the 
ruling elders are supplanted, and annihilated, and live not 
again until a thousand and five hundred years are finished ; 
and yet the Deacons are promoted from an inferior service 
to an Order in the Ministry. Let the Presbyterian give us, 
if he can, the rationale by which these three results were 
simultaneously produced: one of the Presbyters in every 
church on earth becomes Prelate ; the ruling elders in every 
church on earth are annihilated ; the Deacons in every church 
on earth are elevated over the heads of the elders to an order 
in the ministry. The three phenomena are to be fairly met 
and covered, which they can never be by this montes-partu- 
riunt hypothesis of " Standing Moderators." We look there- 
fore to Presbyterianism for a more satisfactory solution, 
some happier afterthought : — I say afterthought ; for such hy- 
potheses were never resorted to, until the dilemma began to 
be severely felt. Necessity proverbially is the mother of in- 
vention. Say ye, " His disciples came by night, and stole 
Him away, while we slept." Say ye, " While the Church re- 
posed in simple and unsuspicious piety, the Bishops came 
and stole away our rank and our prerogative, and stole away 
our elders and our deacons, and we know not where they 
have laid them." So this saying is commonly reported 
among the Presbyterians unto this day. But to me, when I 
understood its terms, it seemed a story more difficult to 
swallow than that which told of disciples stealing a body 
without noise or stir, or waking up the sleepers upon guard : 
for not only has the Presbyterian body disappeared, without 
stir or noise, but the same event has occurred in every city 
on the globe, and even the sepulchre is stolen too, and the 
stone from the door, where we might have seen that for cer- 



HYPOTHESES. 



349 



tain the body had. lain. In the one case we can say, as it is 
a Jewish story, credat Judceus ; but in the other we know 
not what to say, and shall simply add to it, JSfon ego ! 

The universality of Episcopacy in the early ages, when 
there were heretics innumerable who would very gladly have 
disputed an authority which visited them so often with the 
stern exercise of a discipline not very easy in those days to 
bear, and yet which they submitted to without questioning 
the Bishop's rights : is an argument strong men have admit- 
ted to be stronger than they. Baxter, Le Clerc, Bucer, Beza, 
Casaubon, Blondel — all in the Presbyterian ranks — have yield- 
ed to it as the unanswerable argument. Luther and Calvin 
lamented the loss of the Episcopacy, and professed the inten- 
tion to restore it when it should be practicable. Luther, like 
the Methodists, unable to get upon his own terms the genu- 
ine, adopted for the time being a spurious Episcopacy, which 
is still perpetuated in the Lutheran communion. Calvin de- 
clares, " If the Bishops so hold their dignity, that they refuse 
not to submit to Christ, no anathema is too great for those 
who do not regard such a hierarchy with reverence and the 
most implicit obedience." Blondel, the learned Presbyterian, 
says, " By all we have said to assert the rights of Presbytery, 
we do not intend to invalidate the ancient and apostolical 
constitutions of Episcopal pre-eminence, but that whereso- 
ever it has been put down or violated, it ought to be rever- 
ently restored.'''' This argument of universality was one 
with which even Grotius could not grapple, as a Presby- 
terian, and therefore, with a candor equal to the gigantic 
stature of his mind, he says, " To reject the supremacy of 
one pastor above the rest, is to condemn the whole ancient 
Church of folly or even of impiety." Grotius was as familiar 
with antiquity^and with its monuments and fathers, as the 
child with his alphabet and toys. Yet Grotius says, " The 
Episcopacy had its commencement in the times of the 

30 



350 



LOOKING FOR THE CHUECH. 



Apostles. All the fathers, without exception, testify to this. 
The testimony of Jerome alone [Doctor Miller's famous 
and favorite witness in behalf of Presbytery !] is sufficient. 
The catalogues of the Bishops, in Irenseus, Socrates, Theo- 
doret, and others, all of which begin in the Apostolic age, 
testify to this. To refuse credit, in a historical matter, to so 
great authorities, and so unanimous among themselves, is not 
the part of any but an irreverent and stubborn disposition. 
What the whole Church maintains, and was not instituted by 
councils, but was always held, is not with any good reason 
believed to be handed down by any but Apostolic authority" 
It will be observed that Grotius makes it a strong point, that 
Episcopacy had existed as a fact from the beginning, and was 
never " instituted by the authority of councils." In this re- 
spect it stands on the same footing with infant baptism. No 
council of the Church ever commanded infant baptism ; it 
was a universal custom from the beginning. If, in the third 
century, or even in the second, a council had enjoined infant 
baptism, or female communion, or the observance of the 
Lord's Day, it would have justly created suspicion at this day, 
that these were innovations at the time, unknown, or certainly 
not universal, in the pre-existing Church. But councils and 
fathers and catalogues all speak of the Episcopacy as univer- 
sal already, and coeval with the Apostles. No one once 
speaks of Presbytery as ever existing in the Church. Epis- 
copacy did not come in while the soldiers slept. The soldiers 
were awake and at their posts, throughout the long chain of 
defences which they were set to guard. Clemens at Eome 
and Ignatius at Antioch, the former mentioned by St. Paul 
to the Philippians, and the latter a companion of the Apos- 
tles, and both of them Bishops, and consequently martyrs ; 
Irenseus the Bishop of Lyons, and the disciple of Polycarp 
Bishop of Smyrna and friend of St. John ; Tertullian in 
Africa, in the lifetime of Irenseus ; and from them onward, a 



HYPOTHESES. 



351 



chain of witnesses through all the earlier centuries, testify, as 
Grotius allows, not only to the universality of the Episcopacy, 
but to the fact that it was settled " by Apostolic authority." 
His strong language is — yet not stronger than the fact — that 
"all the fathers, without one exception, testify to this." And 
we do not wonder that so great a man as Grotius recoiled 
from the thought that " all the fathers, without one exception, 
testify to" falsehood ! Yet he saw the other horn of the di- 
lemma, when he declared that " to reject the superiority of 
one pastor above the rest, is to condemn the whole ancient 
Church of folly, or even of impiety" and " to refuse credit, in 
a historical matter, to so great authorities, and so unanimous 
among themselves, is not the part of any but an irreverent and 
stubborn disposition." Thus was my own mind shaken, nor 
could the far-fetched supposition of " Standing Moderators" 
moderate at all the misgivings I began to suffer. 

But I understood my right as a Presbyterian too well, not 
to exercise my "private judgment" in the matter, and seek a 
theory for myself ; and for some time after I had seen the 
philosophical fallacy and historical nonentity of the hypoth- 
esis of "Standing Moderators," I was content to remain a 
Presbyterian, on a theory that to me appeared at first, to 
harmonize the several phenomena alluded to before : the ap- 
pearance of the Prelate, the disappearance of the Ruling Elder, 
and the absorption of the Deacons into the Orders of the 
Clergy. My idea was, that the truth lay somewhere between 
the two systems of Presbytery and Episcopacy: that the 
former had unduly abridged, and that the latter had unduly 
expanded, the respective powers of pastor, elder, and deacon. 
I took the liberty of supposing that there were originally in 
in every congregation, by advice of the Apostles, a pastor, a 
bench of elders, and a board of deacons. Keeping this syna- 
gogue theory in view, I in the next place supposed, that in the 
absence of the pastor, an elder might have been allowed to 



352 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



pray, exhort, baptize, and discharge other functions of the 
pastor ; which being allowed, it was then easy to suppose that 
the deacons also, coming into contact with the sick and dying, 
might have shared in certain cases the ministerial offices, an 
inference that the preaching of St. Stephen, and the ministra- 
tion of baptism by St. Philip, two of the seven Apostolic 
deacons, appeared to justify. Then I had only to suppose, 
(for I had seen something like it in my own denomination,) 
that in cities and towns the pastor might have sent his elders 
out into destitute neighborhoods, to collect the more distant 
converts into new congregations ; and that thus, by degrees, 
the ruling became the teaching elder imperceptibly, while the 
pastor became naturally overseer, bishop, or chief pastor of 
the whole circle of congregations. This accounted also, I 
supposed, for the small extent of the early dioceses, and the 
great number of the Bishops. This theory appeared to me 
also more plausible than the hypothesis of "Standing Moder- 
ators," and seemed to harmonize the facts, and to lie more 
clearly within the principles that govern human conduct, by 
allowing pastor, elder, and deacon, simultaneously, to enlarge 
each his appropriate sphere, and, by mutual compromise and 
mutual connivance, to further in each other the expansion of 
their several prerogatives. I supposed that the pastor might 
have said to his elders and deacons, " Make me your Dio- 
cesan, and I will make you into orders of the ministry, and 
give you certain districts of my Diocese." The difficulty did 
not then occur to me, how such a metamorphosis could have 
taken place in every parish under Heaven, when as yet there 
was no possibility of collusion by electric telegraph, and the 
Christians of those unenlightened times did not communicate 
across sea and land by the aid of necromancers, mesmerizers, 
mysterious knockers, and clairvoyants. But a grave objec- 
tion to my theory, as I soon began to feel, was, that it was an 
afterthought, a strained and labored device for getting rid of 



HYPOTHESES. 



353 



palpable historic testimony. And though I managed for a 
time to pacify (for I cannot say to satisfy) myself with some 
such theory floating in dim outline through my troubled 
mind, yet it did not last me long. History was silent as the 
grave about any such expansion of prerogatives, and the hy- 
pothesis would never have existed but, like the "Standing 
Moderators," ex necessitate rei. Besides, my theory conceded 
Prelacy in principle, by allowing that, on ever so small a 
scale, there was a chief pastor, a council of elders with the 
inherent right to administer the word and sacraments under 
his direction, and an order of deacons permitted under certain 
limitations to baptize and preach. Besides, if my hypothesis 
were allowed, it would fasten upon modern Presbytery the 
very usurpation charged against Episcopacy, of abridging the 
ancient powers of the elders and deacons, and engrossing all 
ministerial prerogatives in the person of the pastors ; so that 
Episcopacy, by allowing ministerial functions to the three 
orders, would be, after all, in fact and principle, the very 
Presbyterianism that was supposed to have existed in anti- 
quity. Moreover, the theory did not harmonize with the his- 
torical fact, that there was but one bishop to a city, although, 
like Alexandria, or Antioch, or Jerusalem, or Rome, it may 
have reckoned its disciples by myriads. Yet thus it was that 
I fought conviction oft', by flying, like the infidel, from one 
crude hypothesis to another ; lending too, like him, a more 
willing ear to a cavil or a doubt, than to a compact and uni- 
versal body of unbroken evidence. The demonstration re- 
turned upon me more overwhelmingly than ever : There, said 
I, is the universal fact, attested by universal history, and uni- 
versally accounted for by the writers of the times as Apos- 
tolic in its origin ; a fact which the fathers nowhere argue, 
but everywhere set down as a fact before their day, a fact 
from England to India, a fact reaching to the Apostles. No 
other fact in history is so variously and well attested. Every 

30* 



354 



LOOKING FOR THE CHUECH. 



doctrine of Christianity was disputed in its turn : but the 
Episcopacy was never disputed. Ebionites, Gnostics, Arians, 
all fought to the death against our Blessed Lord's Divinity : 
but against the Bishops there were none to fight. Perpetu- 
ally was the Church kept busy in defining and guarding the 
traditions and faith against every species of innovation and 
heresy ; but there was a subject in which all were agreed, a 
tribunal from which none appealed, a fact which none at any 
time contested — Apostolical Episcopacy. We produce a 
chain of witnesses for the Episcopacy back to Clement, (the 
companion of Saint Paul,) in his Epistle to the Church at 
Corinth. We produce a chain of Bishops, name after name, 
back to St. Mark, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John ; and if 
you will go to the foot of Mount Lebanon they will exhibit 
to you still the succession of their Bishops back to St. Thomas 
on his way to India. We produce a universal Church quietly 
reposing for centuries under the rule and guidance of the 
Bishops, as the centre of unity, the channel of benediction and 
grace, the antitype of the Old Testament Prelacy, and the 
type of heavenly things. And in return for all this demon- 
stration, the like of which is to be found for no other doctrine, 
fact, sentiment, or usage upon earth, we ask you to produce 
one single witness from the first, or the second, or the third 
century, to intimate that such a thing as Presbyterianism 
ever lived ; one — only one — one Church, that, in the first, or 
the second, or the third, or the fourth, or the fifth, or the 
sixth, or the seventh century, was bona fide Presbyterian. 
Show us but one, and we will lay down our pen. 



i 



CHAPTER XXI. 



A FALSE ISSUE; OB, THE PHANTOM GIANT. 

It is no part of my design to discuss at length, the partic- 
ular question which many both within and without the Church 
have too long regarded as the only point of essential differ- 
ence between the Churchman and the Sectarian. Were this 
with me the main point of difference, I should here lay down 
my pen, or suffer it to write but two words more, to say with 
all the fervor I could throw into a prayer — Perish Episco- 
pacy ! Never could I make that the one-idea which should 
separate me from the sects around me, and yet assimilate me 
to them by magnifying a one-idea into a cause of denomina- 
tional distinction. I should without effort drop the miserable 
with from my arm " as a thread of tow when it toucheth the 
fire," and reach to brother Barnes not the left, but " the right 
hand of fellowship." 

Time has been, however, when the government of Bishops 
was, in the ears of Dissenters, the main note of discord among 
" the notes of the Church." In many other things Dissenters 
once spake the Church's language, and sang the Church's song, 
and the Church listened with delight to the distant, though 
broken, echoes of her own voice. But the hour is coming, 
yea, is already come, when the widening departures of the 
sects have demonstrated, at terrific cost, that the whole circle 
of evangelical truth is in controversy. So long, therefore, as 



356 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



the mystery of the Trinity shall be the deep and solid arch- 
way over which a sinner's .path to heaven must lie ; so long 
as the Crown of the slain Man of Calvary shall be so bright 
that not even " the brightness of the Father's glory" can excel 
it, and only the Cross can vie with it in beauty ; so long as 
the Blood of the Lamb shall be the sole hope in the universe, 
of restoration to the Divine favor ; and the Holy Ghost, pro- 
ceeding from the Father and the Son, the sole power in 
heaven or earth to effect our restoration to the Divine 
image'; so long as the enunciation of Faith shall be more 
sublime than the stammerings of reason; and the ministry, 
and word, and sacraments, and alms, and prayers, and fasts, 
shall be the medium for the operations of grace ; so long as sin 
shall be vile, and hell dark ; or a Saviour precious, and heaven 
bright ; or the soul immortal, and the resurrection and the 
judgment certain : so long we must value the Episcopacy as 
earth's great Antipas, and heaven's living and faithful Wit- 
ness. And if the evil time has been when Churchmanship 
was a proud enigma, and another name for bigotry, and an 
intolerable one-idea : the good time has come when, to relax 
it by playing into the hands of vacillating sects, is to play 
false to the ancient Faith and to the Crown of " the Ancient- 
of-days." For two reasons, however, I shall but briefly touch 
the particular dogma of the Episcopacy. One is, that so 
long as Hobart, and Bowden, and Burscough, and Cooke, and 
Onderdonk, and Leslie, and Perceval, and Richardson, and 
Kip, and Wilson, are accessible to the popular reader, and 
the Fathers of a pure and early church may be consulted by 
the student, Episcopacy asks no defence from one who is less 
than the least of all. My other reason is, that since Church- 
men do not regard it as by any means in itself the main 
question at issue, I do not wish to give it an enlargement 
that may convey to the reader the impression that I have, 
myself, any such idea. But inasmuch as I must give a faith- 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



357 



fill narrative, this part of the subject is not to be entirely 
passed over. 

Nothing was now in the way of my returning with entire 
satisfaction to the communion of my forefathers, but the re- 
pudiation of my Presbyterian ordination. For the reader 
will bear in* mind that I was a Presbyterian of an olden 
school, and never for one moment regarded ministerial or- 
dination as a matter of mere ecclesiastical convenience or 
propriety. That it was getting to be so regarded, by the 
controlling spirits of my own communion, was itself the cir- 
cumstance that more than any other made me unhappy, and 
awakened my suspicion that, so far as this matter was con- 
cerned, there must be something wrong. I had regarded my 
.. office with awe, and my brethren as " ministers of Christ and 
stewards of the mysteries of God," and it was more than I 
could bear to hear, in the words of the Princeton Review, 
" that the people can originate as valid a ministry as ever was 
made by Presbytery or Prelate." If the people, I said, may 
impart to me the right to preach the gospel of the Son of God, 
and to administer His holy sacraments, and to " remit and re- 
tain sins," which the Confession of Faith recognizes as their 
high prerogative : then the people must have that right them- 
selves, and the ministry is all superfluous. If, moreover, they 
have the unbounded right of " private judgment," and the Bible 
alone be a sufficient guide : they have no need, that I can see, 
of a Church or ministry to teach them. If the sacraments 
are nothing more than mementos of past events, their com- 
memorative virtue is as good in the hands of the people, as 
of one on whom the people have laid hands : for if there be 
no charm in the hands of a Bishop, it will not be pretended 
that there is any in the hands of the people. If the peo- 
ple may authorize me to preach, I must furthermore preach 
the preaching that they bid me. In vain should I remon- 
strate, 



358 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



" Who ever saw in all his days, 
Sheep lead their shepherd out to graze ?" 

The people, as the source of power, would justly answer me, 

" Though you are now in pastor's chair, . 
Consider, sir, who put you there ; 
Surely, as Shepherd, you must know 
'Twas we, the flock, that made you so; 
And must the thing created claim 
O'er its creator power supreme ?" 

No, no ! Fearful is this utterance of the oracle at Prince- 
ton. Who is riot reminded by it of the " ancient gainsayers f 



■ KORAH AND HIS COMPANY. 

" Ye take too much upon you, 
seeing all the congregation are holy, 
and the Lord is among them; 
wherefore lift ye up yourselves 
above the congregation of the 
Lord ?" 



PRINCETON REVIEW. 

"The power belongs in all its 
vigor to the people, and they can 
originate as valid a ministry as 
ever was made by Presbytery or 
Prelate." 



And a fearful door does this open for the people to fulfil that 
which is written, " The time will come when they will not 
endure sound doctrine, but shall heap to themselves teachers, 
having itching ears." That time has come. The people can 
be now accommodated to their heart's content, and set u.p 
teachers and preachers to teach and to preach just such teach- 
ing and preaching as the people please. 

What floodgates hast thou opened in these latter days, O 
Presbytery, to a Socinian, Universalist, and Pantheistic min- 
istry! While the imperishable Priesthood proclaims "the 
sound doctrine," "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever 
shall be," whether men will hear or whether they will forbear ; 
while, amidst all the sorceries of Rome and the mysteries of 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



359 



her iniquities, thou wilt find no pulpit so mysterious in iniquity 
as to entertain a preacher who should be so much a " man of 
sin" as to deny the Divinity of Jesus, the redemption by the 
- Cross, the Trinity, or the final perdition of the ungodly ; while 
these everlasting truths are so securely guarded that not 
even a Deacon is allowed to serve at table till he have first 
been " set before the Apostles," and they have " laid their 
hands on him:" thou, O Presbytery, hast proclaimed that 
the people have the unbounded right of private judgment in 
these matters, and the prerogative besides "to originate a 
ministry as valid as was ever made by Presbytery or Pre- 
late !" Interrogate thyself, O Presbytery, whether, if Satan 
had two things to ask thee for, thou couldst have better 
pleased him than by granting these : first, that the people 
should have the right to choose their own religion ; and, sec- 
ondly, that they should create a ministry to preach it ! 

I have been more than surprised to find a Presbyterian 
champion, professedly of the olden school, seizing with such 
eager grasp upon a weapon which had long lain rusting on 
the field where the Presbyterians of former days had wrested 
it from the hands of the Independents. I allude to the 
famous supposition of the company of Christians cast upon a 
desert island. " It will be time enough to provide for the 
case when it occurs," said Doctor Miller to the class of which 
I was a member. And better still is the answer of Doctor 
Lathrop, which I shall quote, but not yet. But Doctor Potts 
and the Princeton Review succumb completely to the Con- 
gregationalists, in advocating the power of the laity to " origi- 
nate" a ministry. Well did Doctor Wainwright answer, 
that if the wrecked company, having lost their last Bible, 
should engrave on leaves of trees such parts of it as they 
could imperfectly remember, to be transmitted to their r 
terity : would not their more fortunate descendants h' 
to receive the unmutilated Scriptures, if a bri^ v 



360 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



horizon should afterwards convey to them the authentic Word ? 
And ought not a ministry " originated" in the same man- 
ner, to give place, when times should be more favorable, to 
the ancient and authoritative Priesthood 1 I recollect that a 
Unitarian adduced this very argument to a parishioner of 
mine, to convince him that baptism with sand was as valid as 
baptism with water, because, forsooth, the occasion for its 
ministration might arise in the desert! On the same principle, 
a vegetable instead of bread, and water in the place of wine, 
may be substituted in the most Holy Sacrament, because 
there might be neither bread nor wine upon the desert island. 
And it is a sad fact that the Puritans, in former times, pre- 
sumed to celebrate the Lord's Supper with beer, and milk, 
and ale, and other drinks, for fear the people should lay too 
much stress upon a mere external. Mr. Delavan informs us, 
too, that wine has been dispensed with in a thousand dissent- 
ing congregations in America! The only answer that the 
supposition above stated seems to deserve, is, that whatever 
you may write upon the leaves of trees is not the Bible, 
where the true Bible may be had ; that baptism with sand is 
no baptism, where the baptism with water may be gotten ; 
and that the ministry set up by the people is no ministry, 
where the ministry transmitted from Christ may be enjoyed. 
A desert island ! The ancient order of God's kingdom to be 
uprooted, because, in your judgment, it does not meet the 
necessities of a desert island ! Sirs, do you not perceive that 
you are borrowing, as is not uncommon with you, from the 
armory of the infidel % He tells you, God has left many of 
His children upon lonely isles for ages without your Bible 
or your ministry, and therefore their present priesthood is 
sufficient, and your ministry and Bible are unnecessary. He 
tells you that even a better than Socrates may live in heathen 
lands, walking uprightly in the light and following the best 
voices of nature : and shall a better than Socrates be doomed 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



361 



because he never heard of the Messiah to come 1 Arid must 
the pious Jew, who lives according to the precepts he has 
imbibed at his mother's breast, and rejoices in the light of 
his revelation, and who, perhaps in the heart of Asia, has 
never heard of a Messiah already come, must he perish ? Is 
the Unitarian, in every conceivable circumstance, to go down 
to swell the lamentations of the lost 1 Sirs, take back your 
supposition of the " desert island ;" it savors not the things 
that be of Christ. Your men might be all drowned as well 
as your ministers, and the women escaping from the wreck be 
compelled to institute a female ministry. It is nothing but a 
silly cavil, that would stand as well against any Other truth 
of our most holy faith. It is, mutatis mutandis, the standing 
cavil of the infidel against all Christianity : that, like the 
Apostolic succession to your forlorn Christians, there are mil- 
lions who cannot hear of Christ, and therefore Christianity is 
not essential. And you, my good friends, my former brethren 
of a better school, however you may be pressed for an an- 
swer to more solid reasonings, do, for our old acquaintance's 
sake, let the desert island alone, and leave the Congrega- 
tionalists, by the right of discovery, to provide water for its 
baptism, wine for its communion, and men — or (if all the men 
be drowned) women — for its ministry. 

No alternative was left me now but to face the question of 
the three-fold order of the Ministry, and of the claim to ab- 
solute Apostleship by the present Episcopal bishops. It was 
to me none other than the great question of the succession, 
not to a throne of time on earth, but to a jurisdiction reaching 
beyond earth and time, and to keys which open and shut the 
everlasting gates. 

In pursuing this inquiry, a multitude of facts, of which the- 
following may serve as an example, s forced themselves on my 
attention. • 

First fact : The faith, separated for any length of time from 
31 



362 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



the Episcopacy, disappears ; as a spirit, parted from its body, 
returns from the world to the bosom of God. The Episcopacy, 
therefore, which never surrendered the faith, may not ab- 
surdly claim to indicate " the church of the living God, the 
pillar and ground of the truth." 

Second fact: The histories of three hundred years have 
shown, that a church once separated from the Episcopacy un- 
dervalues the great principle of unity, or an incarnate Saviour 
dwelling by His presence and adorning by His spirit a visible, 
external, and imperishable Body ; and would suffer that body 
to be dismembered and scattered to the winds : just as the 
human clay, when no longer animated by the principle of life 
and unity, falls into fragments and is dissipated into vapor. 
It is not therefore to be believed that, if the element of the 
Episcopacy present a check to this amazing evil, it should in 
the wisdom of God have been overlooked in the organization 
of His Church. 

Third fact : The Lutherans in Europe, and the Methodists 
and Mormons in America, as well as other sects, have done 
homage to the Episcopacy, by engrafting on their own organi- 
zations the government by superintendents, bishops, or supe- 
riors ; and even the Presbyt-erians and Congregationalists, 
finding their denominations inefficient, on the principle of 
ministerial parity, when they rouse them to exertion and 
action, assume invariably an artificial organization with agent, 
secretary, or other officer, to be found always at the head- 
quarters of the society, emancipated from the pastoral tie, 
well acquainted with the field at different and distant points, 
the mouth-piece and source of life to the association, essential 
to its unity, harmony, concert, strength, confidence, action, and 
success. If there be force, therefore, in analogy, the central 
influences so effectively exerted by the Apostles in their life- 
time were no more intended to die with the men, than the 
dissenting missionary and Sunday-school societies at Boston 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



863 



and elsewhere, intended that the excellent Evarts, and Wisner, 
and Cornelius, and Armstrong, and their brethren of the same 
order anywhere, as Heads of these societies, should fall into 
their graves without successors. 

Fourth fact : The Episcopacy was no part of the outcry and 
battle-cry in the Reformation. Neither Luther nor Calvin, 
neither reformer nor reforming synod, had one word to say 
against it. The Church of England, with her noble and un- 
daunted bishops, was the admiration and the envy of the 
continental reformers, who lamented the necessity they sup- 
posed themselves under, of advancing farther and faster than 
the continental bishops would approve ; and who agreed, 
with Calvin, that " no anathema was too great" for those who 
should refuse allegiance to a pure Episcopacy. 

Fifth fact: For years subsequently to the reformation 
from Popery, the men of learning among Presbyterians were 
ready to. acknowledge, with Grotius, the early, universal, and 
Apostolic institution of the Episcopacy ; and this concession, it 
is worthy of remark, ceases to be made only when antiquity 
ceases to be a study. 

Sixth fact: The lovers of antiquity, the readers of the 
Witnesses and Fathers and Councils of the earliest ages, and 
of the contemporaries and companions of the Apostles, are, so 
far as we can learn, believers in the divine gift of the Episco- 
pacy. Who has ever known a man made a Presbyterian by 
reading the early and unmutilated records of the Church'? 
Who requires to be told that sectarians are compelled to 
thrust into a corner the writings of the Christian fathers ? 

Seventh fact : Of the many hundred ministers who have 
broken the sectarian spell and returned into the Church, all 
tell the same story : that to a careful re-examination of 
Scripture and " attendance to reading," they attribute their 
conviction of the Scriptural claim of the Episcopacy. Epis- 
copacy, therefore, from the same high ground with Christian- 



864 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



ity, bears, and demands, and courts, and urges, and challenges 
investigation in what court you please, provided all her wit- 
nesses be present. This is strong presumptive proof that she 
rests on " the foundation of the Apostles and prophets." 

Eighth fact : The Episcopacy is in harmony with the order 
of the natural world ; just as every other great truth of the 
kingdom of God finds itself reflected in the mirror of nature, 
even as it is beautifully echoed in nature's voice. " No man 
hath seen God at any time but we may see the gems of 
His robe twinkling on the firmament by night, and the glance 
of His eye kindling on the sun by day, the dust of His feet 
sweeping by us in the clouds, and the obediences to His will 
in the motions of the universe. The mystery of the ever bless- 
ed Trinity we may not comprehend : but we may observe a 
mystery of trinities in the air above us, in the light around 
us, in the operations of nature, and in man who was made in 
the image of God. The bright and blessed resurrection of the 
just may elude our philosophic grasp : but the bird emerging 
from a putrid egg, and the butterfly uprising from an ugly 
worm, both soaring to the skies on gorgeous wing, tell by 
their flight and song that our flesh shall rest in hope, and 
come up bright as the day, buoyant as the air, and swift in 
its motions as the electric fire ; or else that the meanest seed 
hath a dignity above man, having " power to lay down its 
life and power to take it again." The great principle of the 
atonement which I accept as a believer, I cannot repudiate as 
a philosopher : for the mighty fact of vicarious toil and suf- 
fering to save others from suffering and toil, is interwoven 
with all the orderings of Providence. And thus it is with 
every truth of Revelation : if we had the keys, we might un- 
lock them all in the hieroglyphics of nature ; even hell casts 
its cloud upon the earth, and heaven lets down on us its pro- 
phetic ray. So I could see the principle of the Episcopacy 
in the unities and harmonies around me. In all the analogies 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



365 



of nature I could see no such thing as individualism. The 
things of earth are all controlled by a controlling centre in 
herself ; the earth and planets, with their satellites, move in 
the spheres assigned them round their lord, the sun ; the sun 
and his peers roll steadily around a still loftier throne; 
thrones and dominions and principalities and powers revolve 
in their turn around some starry centre ; and the bright hosts 
of an unmeasured universe roll round some vast metropolis, 
perhaps, the capital of God. For the sake of unity and order, 
a family is provided with its head ; the families of a city, re- 
quire their magistrate ; the cities of a state their governor ; 
■and the states of a continent their president. In the world 
of action every company or corporation has its presiding offi- 
cer ; every merchantman on the wave its master ; every fleet 
upon the seas its admiral; every army its general. This 
very argument to subordination is magnificently set forth by 
St. Clement, the companion of St. Paul, in his admirable 
Epistle to the restless and schismatical members of the 
Church at Corinth. There is to every thing a central point, 
from which every thing depends. Even Presbytery cannot 
shake off the principle ; it would not dream of appointing two 
secretaries of equal power to its great societies, two pastors 
equally supreme over a flock, two moderators at a time to 
one of its assemblies. Thus I perceived all nature, the mo- 
ment its active elements are put in motion, does homage to 
the principle which the Episcopacy recognizes, of subordina- 
tion and obedience. 

Ninth fact : It struck me as strong presumptive evidence 
that the ministry of the Church was to be Episcopal, that 
under the theocracy, or what in modern language we should 
almost call republic, the Jewish priesthood was by divine 
| direction made One in essence, but Three in the distribution 
of its powers, and to all ages a monumental witness to the 
Holy Trinity. When Korah and his company, ministers of 

31* 



366 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



the inferior order, rose up against the prelate of their 
people, the earth, at the commandment of the Lord, opened 
her mouth, and they went down alive into the pit. It is 
certainly in keeping with these facts, that Episcopacy exhibits 
the unity of the ministry in the trinity of its orders ; and it 
is hardly to be wondered at, that earnest men were formerly 
reminded of the Angelical glory, as they saw the Deacons 
ministering around the Priest, and the Priests circling about 
their Bishop, and the Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, arrayed 
in white robes, waiting on their Lord, as satellites about the 
Sun of Righteousness. But there the fact remains, broad as 
the light of day, that God did establish Prelacy, and did vin- 
dicate it from the levellers in the company of Korah, by a 
portentous and terrific miracle. 

Thus did a multitude of independent and collateral facts 
continually force themselves on my attention — although my 
space does not allow me to prolong their record — which 
show Episcopacy to be the only theory that can explain and 
harmonize them all. I now began to see in the venerable 
locks of Episcopacy something that looked like strength ; and 
mistaking the Samson of Israel for the Goliath of Gath, I said 
in my haste, "Let me look again into my scrip for the 
smooth stones which I took from the brook at Princeton." 
So I took out another, which was 

Number Two.* "It is now conceded by all the most pious 
and learned Episcopalians throughout the world, that Bishop 
and Presbyter are terms -of the same meaning in the New 
Testament; that Bishops are called Presbyters, and Pres- 
byters are denominated Bishops : the setting of Bishops 
over Presbyters is, therefore, with a thousand ergos, a usurp- 
ation." 

Doubtless I shall have readers who will hardly understand 
that the form in which this proposition is current among 

* Page 43. 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



367 



Presbyterians, gave me the impression — the real, bona-jide, 
large-as-life impression — that this had been the grand point 
in dispute. Even Dr. Potts, treading in the steps of his pre- 
decessors, finds it impossible to get out of the fog. The 
learned Divines have occupied themselves for years in 
proving what a school-boy with his Greek Testament and 
Lexicon, can discover in fifteen minutes ! But this seems to 
be their way. When we " contend earnestly for the Faith 
once delivered to the saints," they have the faculty of 
making the impression that it is only the Episcopacy for 
which we battle ; and when we come to that Episcopacy, 
as the least among the imperishable truths to be preserved, 
they would make it appear that we are contending that the 
word Bishop in the New Testament signifies more than the 
word Presbyter, and as much as the word Apostle. How- 
ever sincere they may be in wishing to get the world to 
think so, or even in thinking so themselves: "one thing 
is very clear," as the child of Erin said, " they are all very 
much in the dark." The miserable sophism — for it hardly 
! rises to the rank of a sophcrmorism — that all the more learn- 
ed and pious Episcopalians now concede that Bishop and 
I Presbyter are convertible terms in the New Testament, is to 
most of them the end of controversy : the citadel has been 
[ surrendered, say they, the outposts will soon fall. To this, 
; I imagine, it is mainly owing, that Episcopacy is not a sub- 
I ject of investigation in their course of studies ; and to this it 
| is owing, I suppose, that subsequent investigations of the 
question really at issue, have drawn away so many from the 
pulpits of Presbytery to the altars of the Church. 

Yes, I imagined that Episcopalians, in harness and shield 
and buckler clad, had been breathlessly battling this point 
for three hundred years, until now, in the era of steam, and 
electricity, and Greek, they could " kick against the pricks" 
no longer. It gave me no very exalted opinion, I must con- 



368 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



fess, of the learning of the Episcopalian clergy ; for if they 
were such animals as not even yet to know that in the Greek 
Scriptures the term Presbuteros was toto ccelo as good and 
" weighed as much" as the term JZpiscopos, then, spite of 
their groaning shelves of classic and patristic lore, I deeme 
there must, notwithstanding, be 

" About the shelves 
A beggarly account of empty" 

noddles. I knew indeed that the noble universities of th 
Church of England had, now and then, produced their men o 
learning, who might have grasped the annihilating propos - ' 
tion : but it was easy to suppose that they continued in th 
Church, through an Erastian deference to the civil magistrate 
or out of veneration for the ecclesiastical element in the* 
national greatness, or, mayhap, out of regard to their seve 
principles, as John Randolph would have called them — viz. 
the five loaves and two fishes. I knew also that men of min 
and learning had appeared in the Church of America, capabl 
of rising to the dignity of this discovery : but then I coul 
account for their presence in the Episcopal Church by the fore 
of habit and association, or, perhaps, of some foible-fondnes 
(for great minds are wont to have their foibles) for a flowin 
surplice or swelling organ. It was also rumored among us a 
Princeton, that a batch of young divines in that celebrate 
school, who, at a certain epoch, had found their way into th 
Episcopal Church, had not taken the step so much from con- 
viction, or because they wished at all to lift the heel agains' 
Presbytery, as out of bowels of compassion for a sister Churc 1 
into whose system it was desirable to infuse a more evan 
gelical leaven, and that even the professors, when consulte 
on the subject, had applauded the motive and acquiesced i 
the measure ; so that when accident threw me, a few year 
afterwards, on a homeward voyage from Europe, into com- 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



369 



pany with one of these now Right Reverend graduates of 
Princeton, it was with no little surprise I heard him declare, 
that if he had been able, by any possibility, or by any mod- 
erate violence to the light then thrown into his inner man, 
to remain in the Presbyterian communion : no conceivable 
motive short of the stern bidding of conscience could have 
drawn him from it. 

Gentle reader, you may imagine my surprise on discover- 
ing that I had been led into a fog, and had been all this while 
pursuing a phantom. " Presbyter and Bishop designate the 
same office !" It was certainly humiliating to discover that 
Episcopalians had never denied it, and had no motive to dis- 
pute it, and that all this while I had been fighting " as one 
II that beateth the air," and although looking on with both my 
eyes, I had never detected the sleight-of-hand (-writing) by 
which Presbyterian authors had contrived to wrest the Scrip- 
tural argument from its proper basis, and set it on a pedestal 
of straw. 

Know all men, therefore,- to whom these pages shall come, 
that Episcopalians have never disputed that Bishop and Pres- 
byter were the words in use to designate the pastoral office. 
But as the pastoral office still remains among Presbyterians, 
although they may not call their pastors by the name of 
Presbyter or Bishop ; and as among Episcopalians too, the 
pastoral office abides, although they also have dropped the 
name for it of Bishop, and have adopted that of Minister, or 
Presbyter, or Rector : in like manner, Episcopalians contend 
that the Apostolic office is perpetuated also, although, like 
the pastoral, it may now be known under the different appel- 
lation of Bishop. As the pastors did not require so many 
names to designate their office, they went afterward by the 
name of Presbyters : while the successors of the Apostles, 
"not thinking themselves meet to be called Apostles," adopted 
the humbler name of Bishops, which, by consent, was to be 



370 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



thenceforth entirely theirs. How beautifully Theodoret, th 
Syrian Bishop and disciple of St. Chrysostom, who lived in the 
fourth century, has transmitted to posterity this fact. " Th 
same persons," he says, "were in ancient times called in- 
differently, Presbyters or Bishops, at which time those wh 
are now called Bishops, were called Apostles. But shortly 
after, the name of Apostles was left to such as were Apostl 
in the strict sense, and then the name of Bishop was given 
those who before had been called Apostles" The same ma 
be found in the pages of Clemens Alexandrinus, Hilary, Chry 
sostom, and even of Doctor Miller's " famous Jerome." An 
that this motive did operate, and was natural to the breasts o 
holy and humble-minded men, may be gathered from th 
language of Saint Paul himself, who, feeling himself " less t 
the least of all," exclaims, "/ am not meet to be called 
Apostle." Suppose Saint Paul had followed out this inwar 
shrinking of his heart, and had asked his brethren every wher 
to call him Presbyter or Bishop : would he have been, for hi 
humility, any the less an Apostle 1 Was Saint John any th 
less an Apostle, because he never took the name, but alway 
styled himself " the Elder ?" And are the successors of thes 
men any the less their successors, because, feeling unworttr 
to be clad in their mantle, and choosing to leave an illustri 
ous title to those who could have no equal after them, the 
contented themselves with the more modest name of Bishop 
— the Presbyters being able to spare it for them, as the 
did not require for themselves the two-fold name of Pre' 
byter and Bishop. Or if the successors of the Apostles ha 
taken, in humility, as even Paul and the lowly-minded Jo 
did take, the name of Presbyter or Elder, and had left th 
name of Bishop to the pastors : how could such an arrange 
ment of names have ever affected the vested powers of th 
Apostolic office 1 

At this distance of time we may suppose, that if the su~ 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



371 



cessors of the Apostles had claimed and retained the name as 
they did the office, this war of words could never have arisen, 
nor these fogs and mists have dimmed the Presbyterian 
vision. There is a very similar case, familiar to the Hebrew 
student, involving, however, much greater injury to the cause 
of truth. The Jews to this day, and from time immemorial, 
have felt it almost wrong to pronounce or to translate " the 
Great Name," (Jehovah.) Their most ancient commenta- 
tors, the Chaldee Paraphrasts, some of whom nourished be- 
fore the Christian Era, always substitute the title "Lord," 
wherever Moses had employed the Name "Jehovah." From 
the same motive, the Septuagint, before the era of Christ, 
always translated the Great Name by the word Kvpiog, or 
Lord. Now the writers of the New Testament, who quote 
usually from the Septuagint, in applying both these phrases to 
Christ, have distinctly proclaimed the Lord or the Word of 
the New Testament to be the Jehovah of the Old. Yet this 
change of names has greatly weakened the evidences of the 
fact in the understanding of the English reader. Had the 
name JEHOVAH been made over unimpaired and unaltered 
from the Old Testament to the New, in the sundry passages 
which speak of Jehovah in the Old Testament, and in the 
New are applied to Christ under the equal but ambiguous 
name of LORD, it is difficult to see how His Divinity could 
have ever been questioned without setting aside entirely the 
authority of the Bible. And if the earlier successors of the 
Apostles had retained their name, and left the Pastors to be 
called Bishops or Presbyters, or Presbyter-Bishops, at the 
beginning, we should in all probability have heard the trump 
of Gabriel, before we should have been startled by the name 
of Presbyterian. The word Lord, used at the time to desig- 
nate inferior dignities, falls infinitely short of the awful import 
of the name Jehovah ; as the name of Bishop, used once to 
designate an inferior office, falls short of the clear import of 



372 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUECH. 



the name Apostle : and thus on both hands the prima facie 
argument is weakened by which the Lord of the Apostles is 
shown to be the Jehovah of the Prophets, and the Bishops of 
the present Church, the Apostles of the primitive. Sadly h£ 
the Protestant world suffered through this over-reverence of 
the Jewish fathers, and this over-humility of the Christiai 
As a result of the latter, three-fourths of the Protestant work 
have been made Presbyterian : and as a consequence of tl 
former, three-fourths of the Presbyterian world have b( 
made Unitarian. But as the devout scholar will not suffe 
the crown of J ehovah to be wrested from His brow, by 
scholastic play on Greek or English words : so a true scholai 
familiar with antiquity, will not suffer the mitre to be troddei 
in the dust by a repetition of the unmanly quibble. Under 
the surface of the New Testament, the name of JEHOVAH 
is the name of Jesus; and both under and on its surface, I 
could see that the name of APOSTLES is the rightful name 
of those whom we call Bishops. 

This I shall presently show. In the mean time, as to 
this idle talk that " all the more learned and pious Episcopa- 
lians now concede that Presbyter and Bishop are convertible 
terms in the New Testament," give me leave to say, that 
Episcopalians deny that their learning compels them to con- 
cede it ; but they are willing with all modesty to affirm, that 
their humble measure of learning does not permit them to 
debate it. And I would suggest to Presbyterian debaters, if 
they regard their literary reputation, never again to descend 
to this hackneyed and childish bandying of words, which, to 
those who perceive that it is no part of the question, ap- 
pears so exceedingly beneath the controversialist and the 
scholar, or is at best a literary sleight-of-hand, right cleverly 
metamorphosing the issue, or taking away one and substitu- 
ting another, while skilfully diverting the eyes of the spec- 
tators. That our Saviour is called Lord, a name in itself 



A FALSE ISSUE. 



373 



ambiguous and applying to lords many, is no .reason with me 
that He is not " The LOED of lords ;" or that Apostles in 
gentleness of mind have called themselves Presbyters, is no 
evidence to me that they held no higher rank; or that 
their successors chose the modest name of Bishops, is no 
proof to me that they were not successors of the Apostles. 
The noble spirit of that single act proves that they were most 
worthy to be the successors of the Apostles ; for if " through 
ambition" they had usurped the office , they would through 
ambition have usurped the name: but if through humble- 
mindedness' they felt unworthy of the office, they would have 
then felt — as they did feel, and as even St. Paul declared 
himself to be — unworthy of the name. Besides, the fact that 
the name of Bishop was early and universally surrendered to 
them, and from the earliest ages applied no more to any in- 
ferior dignity, is as strong a proof of their Apostleship, as it 
would have been of our Lord's Divinity, if the Church in all 
lands had agreed never again to call any inferior or created 
being by the name of Lord. But if this arrangement of the 
ancient Church is unpalatable to our JPresby terian neighbors, 
and they dislike the bargain : let them take back the name 
of Bishop, so that hereafter it shall mean nothing more than 
pastor, and let the Bishops take back their ancient name of 
Apostles, and let our Blessed Lord have back His ancient 
and awful name Jehovah ; and Presby terianism and Unitarian- 
ism, the parent and the child, will die and disappear together. 

Thus fell to the ground this breastwork of sand. Thus 
vanished in a trice this man of straw. Episcopalians disclaim 
him. Presbyterians made him, and therefore we consent to 
his annihilation by Presbyterian valor. 

And thus ended my first pitched battle with the giant. I 
fought him in a field he never trod : yet I was sure I saw 
him in his greaves of brass, sitting and eyeing me from above 
the ramparts. And although I noticed at the time that it 

32 



374 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



was a little foggy, yet, as all my neighbors declared that he 
was there, and that that was his grand entrenchment, and that 
they had heard him muttering that Bishop was a greater name 
than Presbyter, I sent my Number One, the smooth stone 
from the brook at Princeton, upon its destined mission, and 
felt not a little disconcerted to see it pass smoothly through 
the shadow without striking. Whereupon the fog lifted, and 
the apparition vanished ! 

Do then, Gentlemen, forbear this exhibition of your Greek. 
If you are disposed to come to the question, I will now turn 
a leaf, and give you the opportunity to meet the true issue, as 
I was compelled to encounter it myself. The phantom-giant 
has vanished ; but there is a real live Giant a little further on. 



CHAPTER XXII. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



We are not to forget that the more respectable Presby- 
terians of a school now nearly extinct, maintained for a while 
that the Apostles imparted all the ministerial prerogative of 
their Order to the Presbyters or Parish ministers, who were 
to be, in all essential matters, their lineal and legitimate suc- 
cessors, in a descent that should never be interrupted or lost. 
Among those respectable persons was Dr. Lathrop, who, 
although a New England Congregationalist, has left the fol- 
lowing testimony: — "A ministry in the Church was unde- 
niably instituted by Christ ; introduction to the ministry in 
the apostolic age being by prayer and imposition of hands by 
Elders. The usage was invariably, and without a single de- 
viation, continued as long as the sacred history affords any 
light. No provision is made for cases of necessity, or for the 
renewal of the ministry if it should happen to cease ; [we 
shrewdly suspect that the Dr. intended here a sly allusion to 
the ' desert island we have an express promise from Christ, 
that He will support His Church and be with His ministers 
always, even to the end of the world. It is by no means neces- 
sary that we should prove an uninterrupted succession; we 
have a right to presume it until evidence appears to the con- 
trary. If any say the succession has failed, the burden of 
proof must lie wholly on them. Let them, from incontro- 



376 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



vertible history, show us the time, place, and manner, in which 
it terminated ; who the laymen that ordained them ; and 
where was the scene of the transaction. Until we have this 
information, we rely on the promise of Christ, in the sense in 
which we understand it." I have quoted this language of Dr. 
Lathrop, because it most accurately expresses the views I 
held as a Presbyterian myself, although they are now repu- 
diated by Dr. Potts in behalf of the Presbyterian denomi- 
nation generally. 

As the opinion here advanced, that the Apostles imparted 
all their official rights to Presbyters or Elders, was founded 
principally on single passages, which for example say, " The 
Elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an Elder :" 
it is proper I should show how I was compelled, like Dr. 
Potts, although from different premises, to surrender the 
" tactual" succession, as he calls it, through a long line of 
Elders. And although I had rather do this in English than 
in Greek, yet as my endeavor, in the last chapter, to get a 
word in edgewise among learned men, has wrought me some- 
what into a Greek mood, I shall venture to dabble a moment 
longer in Greek names and synonyms. Eor if the Elders be 
regarded as the true and legitimate successors of the Apostles, 
because the Apostles call themselves Elders : we shall find, 
by looking into the Greek, that the argument will carry us 
farther than is convenient, and therefore that the Presby- 
terians are quite prudent to recede from their old position. 
On looking into the Greek, I found that in several places* 
the Apostleship is called a Deaconship ; and that in another^ 
the Apostle exclaims over the sin of calling disciples by the 
name of men, " Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but 
Deacons by whom ye believed ?" and that on two other occa- 
sionsj he calls the Apostles Deacons. If then the fact that 
the Apostles call themselves Presbyters, proves that the 

* Acts, i. 17, 25 ; xx. 24. f 1 Cor. iii. 5. J 2 Cor. iii. 6 ; yi. 4. 



THE TKUE ISSUE. 



377 



Presbyters are their successors : the fact that they more fre- 
quently call themselves Deacons proves that the Deacons 
have equal claim to be their successors too, especially as their 
order was instituted before that of Presbyters, and made illus- 
trious in the preaching of St. Philip and the martyrdom of 
St. Stephen. The argument therefore of the olden Presby- 
terians was good for nothing, because, as I have shown, it 
proves the Deacons to be, even more than the Presbyters, 
the successors of the Apostles. But though this mode of 
reasoning has proved too much already, yet it would prove 
even more; for our Blessed Lord is, in one place* called 
" Apostle," and in anotherf " Bishop," and in another^ " Dea- 
con," (see the Greek ;) and it will not be alleged that this 
gives any ground for presuming an equality of jurisdiction or 
of order. Gentlemen, is it not time to cease this foolish bab- 
bling about " convertible terms ?" 

In fact, I perceived the utter irrelevancy and inadmissi- 
bility of this reasoning, long before I ceased to be a Presbyte- 
rian ; and therefore did not retain it among the " smooth stones 
from the brook." For, in the green season of youth, I had 
analysis enough in my mental organization to • perceive, that 
the lower was covered by the higher, and the less compre- 
hended of the greater : that the Lord might significantly 
enough be called Apostle, Bishop, or Deacon, as he washed 
the feet of his disciples ; that an Apostle might be styled 
Presbyter or Deacon ; and in like manner a Presbyter be 
called a Deacon : the greater, in each instance, comprehending 
all the less. At the same time, I saw that there was no con- 
fusion of order, or mixture of prerogative ; for in the New 
Testament, a Deacon is never styled a Presbyter ; a Presby- 
ter never called an Apostle ; and an Apostle never designated 
by the Master's name : but Apostles, Presbyters, and Deacons, 
all serve in distinct and harmonious Orders around their Lord. 

* Heb. iii. 1. f 1 Peter, ii. 25. X Rom. xv. 8. 

32* 



878 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



And on observing more attentively, I found the Apostles 
sometimes in the actual office of the Presbyter, consecrating 
the Eucharist ; and sometimes (especially before the Deacons 
were ordained) in the capacity of the Deacon, administering 
baptism, (although at other times St. Peter only "com- 
manded them to be baptized," and in the Church at Corinth, 
St. Paul scarcely consented to baptize at all :) but I could 
never find a mere Deacon usurping the consecration of the 
Holy Eucharist, nor a mere Presbyter presuming alone on the 
ordination to the holy ministry. It cannot surely be worth 
while to notice the resort had to the incident at Antioch,* where 
" certain prophets," acting by inspiration, laid their hands on 
Barnabas and Saul and sent them on a special mission ; for 
we read afterwardf that they returned "to Antioch, from 
whence they had been recommended to the grace of God for 
the work which they fulfilled ;" and St. Paul says most dis- 
tinctly that he was made an Apostle, " not of men, neither by 
man," and he had in fact been an Apostle ten years before the 
transactions at Antioch. The necessity of resort to such an 
incident, may convince the reader how entirely the theory 
lacks the countenance of Scripture. 

When Presbyterians perceive therefore that, if the Elders 
be the successors of the Apostles, the Deacons must be their 
successors too : they take back this move upon the board, and 
contrary to all-the rules of ingenuous debate, make another 
— in the opposite direction. But let them take back the move ! 
They tell us now that the Apostles had no successors ; that 
the Apostolic office died out with the twelve original incum- 
bents ; in fact, that the whole doctrine of lineal and tactual 
succession, whether in the line of Presbyters or of Apostles 
is useless and absurd : since " the power belongs in all its 
vigor to the people, and they can originate as valid a ministry as 
ever was made by Presbytery or Prelate." Though I myself 



Acts, xiii. 1-3. 



+ Acts, xiv. 26. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



379 



repudiated, as a Presbyterian, the latter part of this proposition, 
yet I adhered to the former, viz., that the Apostolic office 
had died with the first Apostles, and that the only succes- 
sion was of Presbyters to Presbyters. So here I put my 
hand into my bag again, and took out another smooth stone, 
which shall I call 

Number Three. " The Apostles were twelve, and this num- 
ber was never meant to be increased. They have therefore 
no successors. They saw the Lord, whom their pretended 
successors have not seen. They wrought signs and wonders, 
which their pretended successors cannot do. They were in- 
dividually inspired, which their pretended successors are not. 
Therefore their pretended successors ' say they are Apostles 
and are not, but do lie,' and are ' not Apostles but Apostates, 
not Pastors but Impostors, not Prelates but Pilates.' " 

According to the terms of this proposition, an Apostle is 
one who (1) has seen the Lord, (2) can speak with tongues, 
(3) can work miracles, and (4) has the gift of inspiration. 
But on turning to the New Testament, I soon began to notice 
(1) that devout women, and about five hundred brethren at 
once, had seen the Lord after he was risen ; and although 
St. Paul appeals to them as living witnesses, of the resurrec- 
tion, surely they were not all Apostles ! I read in another 
place (2) that the disciples of St. John the Baptist, when St. 
Paul had baptized them with a Christian baptism, and had 
laid his confirming hands on them, as also Cornelius and his 
friends, and also a confused multitude in the Church of Corinth, 
spake constantly with tongues : but it will hardly be sup- 
posed that these were all Apostles ! I saw again (3) that 
the disciples at Ephesus, and the four daughters of Philip, 
and certain who came from Jerusalem to Antioch, especially 
one Agabus, were all inspired ; some of them foretelling 
events which even to Apostles had been unknown, and which 
had much to do in shaping their course, and giving direction 



380 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



to the counsels and destinies of the whole Church : yet who 
will say that these were all Apostles % And yet again I saw 
(4) that the deacons, Stephen and Philip, and their brethren, 
filled Jerusalem and Samaria with the fame of their stupen- 
dous miracles ; and that the scattered Presbyters spoken of 
by St. James, could raise the sick by anointkig them with 
oil : yet surely these were not all Apostles ! One thing is 
therefore certain, either that the elders, and deacons, and lay 
men and women were Apostles, and that thus there was a 
multitudinous succession : or else that having seen the Lord, 
speaking with tongues, working miracles, and being inspired, 
were never the marks by which to distinguish an Apostle from 
a deacon, from a presbyter, or even from a lay man or woman. 
All the facts on the face of Scripture tend to the same point. 
When St. Paul writes to a Church — for example to the 
Church of Corinth — it is not to speak with tongues that he 
intrudes: for he says to them, "Though I speak with the 
tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am 
as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbaL" It is hot to dazzle 
them with the splendor of miracles, that he interferes : for he 
declares, " Though I could remove mountains and have not 
charity, I am nothing." It is not to tell them that he exclu- 
sively had seen the Lord : for he appeals to five hundred wit- 
nesses of the great event. It is not to utter prophecy or con- 
vince by inspiration : for in all these gifts the Church at Corinth 
was already itself illustrious. Nor was it to impart the holy 
supper; nor was it to baptize; nor was 'it to preach the 
gospel merely : for Corinth had her Eucharist and established 
ministry already. But it was to assert a jurisdiction, an 
" authority," " a power which the Lord had given him ;" to 
tell them that sinned, and all other, that, "if he came he 
would not spare ;" to deliver one particularly, who had 
sinned, " unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the 
spirit might be saved to declare his " forgiveness" and res- 



THE TEUE ISSUE. 



381 



toration of the penitent to a place and hope among the faith- 
ful ; to enjoin the weekly offertory for the saints, as he had 
"given order in the Churches of Galatia;" and to assert the 
right as to " the rest" of their affairs, to " set them in order 
when he should come." Miracles, tongues, inspiration, having 
seen the Lord — what are they all, but incidental circumstances, 
which might or might not exist in the person of the Apostles, 
as they might or might not exist in the persons of the pres- 
byters and deacons ? 

But it is not enough that this proposition should be loose 
and unscriptural in its terms • it must be urged by comments 
that make it painfully profane. So respectable a Presbyterian 
divine as engaged Doctor Wainwright in the controversy that 
did the Church such good service a few years since, would 
like to see the Bishop who " could tell of a disease cured, 
sight restored, a fractured limb healed, or a discourse in an 
unknown tongue delivered, by any of those upon whom he 
has laid his hands. The Apostles wrought miracles," exclaims 
this learned author ! " they could take up serpents and drink 
any deadly thing without harm ; but what Prelate would be 
hardy enough to try the experiment upon himself, of taking 
a dose of poison 1 Prussic acid would be, I doubt not, as 
fatal to Doctor Doane as to Doctor Wainwright." 

I am not able now to lay my hand on a copy of Tom Paine, 
or of Voltaire, or of Kousseau ; for this sort of language I 
think I have met with almost verbatim in one or other of 
those writers. Let me remind the reader of the passage 
to which this controversialist so flippantly alludes.* " These 

* We have already had occasion to remark the want of reverence which is 
at once one of the most potent causes, and one of the most terrible results, of the 
experiment of separation from the ancient Church. " We did not owe God any 
money ; we did not rob the treasury of heaven ; Christ therefore did not pay any 
debt of ours," exclaims the learned and evangelical Doctor Edwards. " God 
knows," '• the Lord knows," « bn God's earth," « under God's heavens," and 
phrases with the words " cursed," the « devil," " hell," &c, flippantly brought in by 



382 



LOOEDsG FOR THE CHURCH. 



signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall 
they cast out devils ; they shall speak with new tongues ; 

the many platform divines, hare called forth the notice and reprobation even of a 
■wounded secular press. M How the minister did ' cuss' to-day !" is a just criticism 
I have heard more than once upon the preacher ; nay, I have heard an educated 
Presbyterian preacher reprove the slothful as ' ; too cursed lazy,*' and another 
promise the spiritual that their very eyes should be so filled with the Holy Ghost 
as to look all hell out of countenance." How far the Sectarian pulpit, by its 
familiar use of such language, is responsible for the frightful profanity and blas- 
phemy that darken our land, is a question I desire not to answer, but take the 
liberty of asking. Certainly, it contrasts much with the sparing use of such terms 
in the preachings of Apostles and of the Blessed Master ! At a late May Missionary 
Anniversary in New York, a learned and Rev. Professor from Cincinnati, presented 
the following: 

" Resolved. That the valley of the Mississippi is a part of the territory between 
• the great river and the ends of the earth,'' which belongs to Jesus Christ by 
especial grant from Almighty God, and that Jesus Christ must have it 1" Such 
language would have turned the faces of an Episcopalian audience pale ! A recent 
Plymouth dinner in New York, it appears, could suggest the " sentiment," " Ply- 
mouth Rock, the Rock of Ages f The Editor of the New York Evangelist, a 
scholar and an evangelical divine, on the principle of Sectarianism maintaining 
one truth \in this instance, the atonement ) at the expense of other truths," 
indulges in the following wild strain against the Unitarians : •• What is the example 
which the sufferings and death of Christ afford ? An example, if unexplained by 
any other circumstances. • the most frightful and disgusting the world ever saw.' 
If this were Christ's object, • he has most miserably failed.' He never manifested 
any extraordinary exemplary deportment. His anguish and cries, his bloody siceat 
in the garden, and his pitiful cry on the cross, seem to be entirely unmanly. The 
desertion of his friends and the cruelty of his enemies. ; he might have borne with 
far greater composure.' Many of his 'followers in all ages have endured much 
sorer evils than he experienced, with • far more apparent magnanimity and self- 
possession.' So far from setting an example of patience and self-possession in the 
hour of suffering and trial, 1 he migh| be commended to the example of some of 
his own followers."" O my Blessed Saviour ! How long, how long ? Brethren of 
the Church, why will you seek alliances w ith the downward system, and put your 
hand within the hand of sects upon the precipice ? 

u Prussic acid'' and •• fractured limbs" and K discourses in an unknown tongue" 
are but the genteeler utterance of the same irreverent spirit. But to show that the 
most gifted and brilliant minds are fated to be borne helplessly along this tide 
which sweeps all the old sacred landmarks before it, read the lecture of Dr. Cox, 
a divine known as widely to fame in the dissenting world, as any in America. I 
can give but a few extracts, together with the demonstrations of applause they 
elicited from his audience. (Scene, a meeting-house in Broadway. Time. 1844.) 
After alluding to the Puritan Dinner. Mr. Choate's oration, and the controversy 
then pending between Drs. Wainwright and Potts, this divine, as reported by the 
press, proceeds : "In his opinion, the words • a Church without a Bishop, a State 
without a King,' deserved the same immortality with the Star-spangled banner, or 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



383 



they shall take up serpents ; and if they drink any deadly 
thing, it shall not hurt them ; they shall lay hands on the 

even ' Yankee Doodle.' [A round of applause.] There was no more reason why men 
should be ridden by churchmen ' booted and spurred by the grace of God,' than 
that they should admit that they were born ' with saddles on their backs,' for 
monarchy or aristocracy to ride. But he meant to keep his temper while he 
treated 'this eminently satanic' dogma as it deserved . . . for all the afflicted 
communities which believe in it, must ' fall with the devil.' . . . The word Bishop 
only meant an overseer ; as simple, uncrosiered, unmitred, unfrocked, as Paul was 
4 when he left his cloak at Troas !' [A roar of laughter from every part of the 
house.] . . . The unchurching dogma placed such quarantine on all Christians, 
except the Prelatists, as to render it actually only ' a case of smuggling' if they 
ever got into heaven at all. [The audience roared again with merriment.] The 
Doctor then read from a commentator on the Romish notion of the Eucharist, in 
which the ' quid et uW of the Body of Christ was discussed. The ' quiddity' of it 
[great laughter] troubled them much. As to 1 where' it was, there was a difference 
of opinion ; but most agreed it was in ' the imagination.' . . . Monsieur Tal- 
leyrand, after a life of any thing but clerical purity, ' was greased in his extremities' 
and became ' reconciled to God.' [Loud laughter.] That was unction without 
function, with a witness. [Roars of laughter.] He did not wish to make hia 
audience laugh, and vindicated his irony by referring to passages of Scripture 
where that mode of treating sacred things was adopted. ' Where two or three 
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them, and when 
Christ is present, he should like to know how many deacons, priests, bishops, 
popes, and cardinals it takes to make a quorum. How many do they count Christ ? 
[Laughter.] Rowland Hill, though he died only a deacon, to which ' primus 
gradus' he was kept by that Church because he was too evangelical, had more 
religion than all the rest of the English clergy put together. Three-fourths of them 
aU were Puseyites, and he did not know how many more would be so by the 
arrival of the next steamer. [Laughter.] The tendencies of their clergy were 
towards Oxford ; and the tendencies of Oxford were towards Rome ; and the 

tendencies of Rome were towards but look in the book of Revelation. 

[Laughter.] ... He told a humorous anecdote about ' kneeling at the Eucharist,' 
which stirred greatly the mirth of his audience. This genuflection in the sacrament, 
was an idolatrous observance, originally paid to the bread, which was held to be 
the very body of Christ. And hence arose the term now in common use, of ' hocus- 
pocus,' a corruption of ' hoc est corpus,'' ' this is my Body' ; and this (said the 
Doctor) is the origin of ' all this curvature on marrow bones.' [This, adds the 
Reporter, was the most successful hit yet made by the reverend lecturer. The 
audience were literally ' convulsed with mirth.' Perhaps, however, ' the droll 
allusion to Paul's missing garment,' was somewhat more cordially applauded.]" 

But I cannot proceed with this any further. My soul revolts, my heart is sad, 
and every bone in my body cries out with fear. " Yankee Doodle," " unfrocking 
an apostle," " greased in his extremities," " booted and spurred by the grace of 
God," and such like things, might all have been endured : but the blasphemy 
about " the quiddity of the Body of Christ," the kneeling at the awful Eucharist, 
practised universally one thousand years before transubstantiation was invented, 



384 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



sick, and they shall recover."* " These signs shall follow 
them that believe." I have known two highly intelligent Pres- 
byterian laymen, who, by " private interpretation" of this and 
other passages, became almost atheistical, and revelled for 
years in the reading of Voltaire and Paine : but who are now 
walking hand in hand humbly and happily " in the fellowship 
of the Apostles." The wild blasphemer on the streets may 
now catch from solemn divines the exulting demand, not that 
these signs should follow in the steps of Bishops, but that 
they should " follow them that believe." Not the right of the 
Apostolical succession, gentlemen, but the " articulus ecclesiae 
stantis vel cadentis" the great doctrine of Justification by 
Faith, you have now cast before the feet of swine : for " these 
signs shall follow them that believe." Am I dreaming Or 
has a Presbyterian and dignified divine, schooled neither at 
Geneva nor at Berlin, neither at Belfast, nor at Harvard, but 
at Princeton, challenged a Bishop to drink prussic acid, that 
the world might at once believe or scorn 1 ■ Look well what 
company you are now in ! " What works we have heard 
done in Capernaum, do here in thine own country." " If thou 
be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence." " If he 
be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, 
and we will believe him." 

Had it been an infidel, baffled in his reasonings and taking 
counsel of his passions, I could in silence have suffered him 
to rail and wag the head. But as it is one of " the scribes 
and elders" that has cast the same in our teeth, our common 

yet here most ignorantly charged to that invention, and ridiculed as " curvature on 
marrow bones," aDd the terrific blasphemy of M hocus-pocus" alleged to be derived 
from the awful words — not of Rome, remember, but of Jesus — " hoc est corpus," 
this is my Body ; and the " roars of convulsive laughter" responded by the 
multitude : all these things cause me to yearn, with every affection of my soul, to 
shield my blessed Saviour from the hooting3 of a populace, for whom His own 
example must teach those who "reverence the Son" to pray, "Father, forgive 
them ; they know not what they do !" 

• Mark, xvl. 17, 18. 



THE TEUE ISSUE. 



385 



Christianity requires me to speak in her defence. A pure 
and virtuous generation then, desire no miracle to draw them 
into close alliances with truth and virtue. Miracles have 
never' been demanded but by "an adulterous and sinful gen- 
eration." They have never, in the wisdom of God, been 
deemed necessary, except for gross and unenlightened minds, 
and in periods of dark and deep corruption : and when they 
have answered this temporary purpose, they pass away. 
When Moses claimed to be a Lawgiver, and Elijah a Re- 
former, a degraded people asked and were allowed a sign. 
When One came claiming to be " equal with God," a people 
incapable of appreciating truth and goodness, demanded that 
he should work the works of God. When it was alleged that 
the Holy Ghost descended invisibly in Baptism, it was proper 
that outward evidences should be at first allowed, in the de- 
scending "dove," the nightly "wind," the cloven "flame," 
and the gift of " tongues." When it was alleged that a new 
measure of grace was vouchsafed in Confirmation, it was well 
that palpable and audible proof should be allowed, as in the 
converts of Samaria, and the disciples at Ephesus, when St. 
Peter and St. John had laid hands on the former, and St. 
Paul on the latter. When it was alleged that grace upon 
grace was imparted by the unseen Comforter to the believer, 
as he rose to the higher functions of the ministerial office, it 
was expedient that He should indicate His gracious Presence, 
as He did, in the humblest deacons at Jerusalem, by tongues 
and inspiration, and the gifts of healing. All this was done, 
that the Church in all ages might believe, that the Holy 
Ghost is ever flowing forth at her prayer, in these appointed 
channels ; and that the cheering promise " as thy days so shall 
thy strength be," might accompany her children as they 
passed on to the higher callings of the Christian life. The 
miracles, once wrought, are her perpetual credentials, the seal 
and stamp of Omnipotence impressed, once for all, upon the 

33 



386 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



vocations and offices she bears. She no more asks to see 
them again, than an ambassador from human courts would 
ask to see the act renewed by which his sovereign's seal was 
stamped on his commission. There it is. It cannot be coun- 
terfeited. It is not the office : but it beareth witness of the 
office, that its acts are valid and authoritative. It is enough. 
The wise shall understand. The elect shall believe. "A 
sinful generation seeketh after a sign, but there shall no sign 
be given it." 

Albeit, the Church is not without her " signs following." 
Korah and his company went down alive into the pit for 
rising up against the Prelacy. ' The leprosy of Socinianism 
pursues the generations of Presbytery under all suns and 
climes ; and, sirs, you cannot shake the poison from your 
skirts ! These are the only " signs" that shall be given you. 
We do not ask Bishop Doane to take the " dose of poison" or 
to drink "prussic acid:" Jannes and Jambres might ask the 
same. But the long line of Bishops " have kept the faith," 
which they who have quitted " the fellowship of the apostles" 
have been unable to do. " Lo, this is the finger of God." 
The deadly poison has been proffered to the lips of the 
Church and of her Bishops : but they who have had by inher- 
itance the discerning of the spirits, have perceived that death 
was in the cup. Once ye imagined that ye had consigned 
the evil spirit of Socinianism, with the body of Servetus, to the 
fires : but as ye stood around the stake, the evil spirit leaped 
from the flame, and overcame you, and prevailed against you ! 
u Jesus I know, and His Apostles I know ; but who are ye V 
From the pinnacles of your temples in Geneva and Belfast, and 
Boston and Berlin, we have in grief unutterable seen you cast 
headlong the Lamb " that did not resist you :" but the Church, 
as a good angel, hath run and " borne Him up in her hands I" 
As the keeper of the strong Tower built in the midst of the 
Vineyard, she has preserved the Crown of her Lord untouched 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



387 



by the thieves of Berlin and Geneva ; and the crown-jewels of 
His kingdom safe from the burglars of Belfast and Boston. 
Ask not then, to see a father of the Church take " prussic acid ;" 
as " that fox" desired to see some miracle done by the Mas- 
ter : but amidst the endless distractions of Dissent, look about 
you for the more " infallible sign" which the Great Master 
Himself hath given us, even the succession and unity, " that 
the world might believe." 

As logically might you reason that a Deacon is not a 
Deacon, because he does not work the works of St. Stephen ; 
or that an Elder is not an Elder, because he does not anoint 
and raise the sick as did the Elders of St. James ; or that Be- 
lievers are not Believers, because they do not show the signs 
promised to " follow them that believe :" as that Apostles 
are not Apostles, because they do not the works of St. Peter 
or St. Paul. While your doctrine of individualism requires 
these signs to follow you, as individual believers : our doctrine 
of the One Body makes these demonstrations as much ours as 
they were those of the believers in the Apostles' times. We 
no more ask to see these miracles attend each individual, suc- 
ceeding to his lawful predecessor in the Apostolic chain, than 
we should ask to see the Holy Dove descend in open day on 
each copy of the Scriptures, as it emanated from the press in 
the line of its predecessors back to the original manuscripts 
of Moses and Matthew. Do then desist from this unmanly 
and atheistic quibbling ! 

We beg the reader to pardon this digression. Purged of 
its profanity and stripped of its irrelevant appendages, the 
proposition will stand simply thus : " The Apostles were 
twelve. Their number was never meant to be increased. 
They have therefore no successors." 

The Rev. W. D. Snodgrass, Doctor of Divinity, and an 
Old School Presbyterian, in his " Discourses on the Apostolic 
Succession," as late as 1844, thus states the proposition in 



'388 
i 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



capitals: — "Their number was definite and specified— 
there were only TWELVE — and this number was not to be 
increased — Jesus said, Have not I chosen you twelve ? And 
the twelve was the name by which they were constantly 
known. They were to have twelve thrones — are compared 
with the twelve tribes and with the twelve foundations of the 
city. Here we are transported, not only to the end of time, 
but to the visions of eternity. Earth has passed away, and 
there is no more sea — and still the number is only twelve !" 
Eeally, Doctor, this is almost as logical as, " In the beginning 
God created the heavens and the earth" — but not one word, 
my Brethren, of his creating Bishops ! 

The Apostles without successors 1 Where is the Master's 
promise, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
the world?" This was a promise made to Apostles, and 
to Apostles only. Examine it minutely, if you will: 
" Unto the end of the world." This same evangelist 
had said in sundry places, " The harvest is the end of the 
world f "so shall it be in the end of the world f "what 
shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the 
world" This phrase in all instances designates distinctly 
the Day of Judgment, or the end of the Dispensation of 
Grace. Here then is Jesus on the mount in Galilee. It 
is the parting scene. The cloud of shining ones is on the air, 
approaching to receive Him. No more, till He shall come to 
judgment, shall we behold His face or hear His voice on earth. 
Master, what words of comfort wilt Thou leave % To whom 
shall we look up when Thou art gone 1 See Him " lift up 
His hands" that virtue may go forth from Him to the 
Eleven. See now His lips opening to speak. Hear now His 
last words in this dark world to His Apostles : " Lo, / am 
with you alway, even unto the end of the world." But scru- 
tinize the parting promise, if you will, with a freezing and 
jealous criticism: "Alway" — tutf<xs <rag ^pac, — all the days 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



389 



of the world unto its very end. Not even for a day, so long 
as the world shall stand, shall your venerable line be inter- 
rupted. And now, if you think that there has been at any 
time an interruption, we beg you to tell us when and where. 
Who were the last in the old line of the Apostles, and who 
were the first in the line now claiming to succeed them? 
Show us, if you can, that one single link has failed in this 
long chain through eighteen centuries. You cannot do it! 

The Apostles without successors ? No, Sirs ! We can pro- 
duce the long and truthful catalogue of their successors, reach- 
ing back at Alexandria to St. Mark, at Antioch to St. John 
or St. Peter, at Jerusalem to St. James, at Eome to St. Paul 
and St. Peter, in Syria to St. Thomas, at Canterbury, in "a 
three-fold cord not quickly broken," to St. Paul and St. John 
and St. Peter. The existence of these catalogues, in nations 
which had had no mutual intercourse for centuries, is as reliable 
evidence as are the genealogies kept by the Levitical priest- 
hood of the ancestry of the Messiah himself, as traced through 
Joseph and Mary. One seems absurd to the infidel : the 
other may seem absurd to the Presbyterian. It was not to 
meet the cavils of Dissent that these catalogues were kept. 
They were but the natural records of the Society. A thousand 
years before Calvin and Luther were born, holy men, deemed 
worthy of the crown of martyrdom, recorded, on the open 
page of history, these catalogues of a then bright and unbroken 
and uncontested succession. Even the Syrian Church, so 
early and Jewish in its origin as to have incorporated and to 
this day retained among her rites the circumcision, the slain 
lamb, and the first-fruits, of the Jewish faith: will show 
you, in the inaccessible fastnesses where she dwelt alone and 
has not been numbered with the people, nor even been known 
to her sister churches for fifteen hundred years, a long line of 
Bishops back to St. Thomas. Rather than the line should be 
broken, men were found willing to bridge the threatened 

33* 



890 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



chasm by throwing their bodies into fire or flood, to per- 
fect the chain and connect the future with the past. And 
now, as you believe the flowers of the field to be, each in its 
line, the legitimate successors of the originals as they bloomed 
first from the Creator's hand, although you are quite unable to 
trace the succession back to the miraculous beginning ; or as 
you are sure that the line of believers has never failed in 
happy succession back to the disciples who first sat at the 
Master's feet, although you are entirely unable to trace the 
holy line through the centuries gone by ; or as you know the 
Bible to be a trjie copy of a copy of another copy still, back 
to the inspired pens of Moses and Matthew, although you are 
equally unable to trace the lineal succession : so are we cer- 
tain that the present Bishops or Apostles are^ the rightful 
successors of Apostles who succeeded others, in unbroken 
chains, back to the hands of the adorable Master. And a 
miracle is no more necessary to prove Bishop Doane an 
Apostle, than to drink prussic acid with impunity would be 
to prove Dr. Potts a believer ; or a voice from heaven saying, 
" Let the earth bring it forth," to prove the lily of the field 
to be the work of God ; or the Dove descending from the 
sky to prove our Scriptures to be a true successor, in un- 
broken line, to the Greek and Hebrew scriptures indited 
by the Holy Spirit. To us the Master's promise is the end 
of doubt. To you, and to the world, we produce the unin- 
terrupted testimony of* the Church, and in lands ever so re- 
mote, the unfailing chain of names from the beginning to this 
present ; besides the signs following of Unity and an unalter- 
able Faith. 

The Apostles without successors ? No, Sirs ! As we find 
the early Church full of Deacons, whom we believe to have suc- 
ceeded to the office of the inspired and wonder-working Dea- 
cons at Jerusalem, although the Master made them no promise 
to perpetuate their order, inasmuch as He ascended into 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



391 



heaven previously to their existence ; or as we find the early 
Church full of Presbyters or Elders, and believe them to have 
inherited the office of the wonder-working Elders in the days of 
St. 3ta.es, although as Elders they could have had no promise 
of their perpetuity from Christ, who returned to the Father 
before their ordination : so when we find the early Church 
illustrious in lofty names claiming and tracing their succes- 
sion in unbroken line to the Apostles, and even declaring 
schismatics to be separated from Christ because separated from 
" the fellowship of the Apostles, shall we doubt that these 
holy men were the legitimate inheritors of Apostolical prerog- 
atives % The whole world, Catholic and h^petic, acceded to the 
claim ; no heretic we read of, however chafed and galled by 
his Bishop's excommunication, was heretical on this one point. 
It is not Doane and Mcllvaine and Meade and Ives putting 
forth this claim in the nineteenth century ; nor Cranmer nor 
Latimer nor Ridley nor Jewel in the sixteenth : but Augus- 
tine and Cyril in the fifth, Chrysostom and Basil and Ambrose 
and Gregory in the fourth, Firmillian and Cyprian in the 
third, Irenseus in the second, and Clement and Ignatius and 
Poly carp in the first, all asserting, in easy and natural language, 
as if it was understood by all and disputed by none, that 
they succeeded to the jurisdiction of the Apostles. It is the 
six early and general Councils of the Church, at Nice, at Con- 
stantinople, at Ephesus, at Chalcedon, and twice again at Con- 
stantinople, numbering in all 1628 Bishops, besides local and 
provincial Councils almost innumerable, not legislating the 
Apostolical succession into existence, but recognizing it as a 
fact already universally taken for granted. And I cannot 
refrain from again adducing the concession of the very learned 
Grotius, who says : " All the fathers without exception testify 
to this. ... The catalogues of the Bishops in Ireneeus, 
Socrates, Theodoret, and others, all of which begin in the 
apostolic age, bear witness to the same. To refuse credit in 



392 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



an historical matter to so great authors, and so unanimous 
among themselves, is not the part of any but an irreverent 
and obstinate disposition. What the whole Church main- 
tains, and was not instituted by councils, but was always he15, is 
not with any good reason believed to be handed down by any 
but apostolical authority." It may be very well, gentlemen, 
for you who have lost the Apostolical Succession, whether 
accidentally or by cutting yourselves away from it, now to 
denounce it (so did not your fathers) as a cumbersome and in- 
convenient appendage to the body ecclesiastical : but still we 
have noticed that the Lutherans and Methodists have begun 
to re-admire the cumbersome excrescence, and have fastened 
on to their bodies the artificial fixture of this same ap- 
pendage. 

The Apostles without successors ? Let us open the New 
Testament and see. The writings of this book were not 
ascertained or collected for three hundred years after the 
Church had been in vigorous operation on three continents. 
The earliest Epistles were written thirty years after the 
Church was organized ; and those to the seven Churches in 
Asia upwards of fifty years after the ascension of Christ. I 
shall not therefore find in it directions for the organization of 
the Church ; but I may find in it allusions to a state of things, 
in that respect," already settled. In like manner I shall find 
no commandment to keep the first day of the week, to baptize 
infants, to worship Jesus as the only God, to hold the Trinity 
as the foundation of the faith : but if the first day of the week 
was known and venerated, I shall find allusions to the day, 
not to be mistaken ; if J esus was worshipped as God, I shall 
find language that cannot be explained on any other theory ; 
if the Trinity was held as the foundation, I shall meet with 
expressions that harmonize with the sublime and blessed 
doctrine. In fact, these incidental references to well-known 
facts are stronger demonstrations than direct and studied and 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



393 



dogmatic definitions, which are never resorted to so long as 
the facts are admitted ; and which, in the Church, were never 
employed on any subject until the facts began to be disputed. 
Hence, in the councils of the Church, and all her legislation, 
and in the Scriptures, there is no strong, dogmatic order to 
enforce Episcopacy, because (as Grotius observes) the great 
fact of Apostolic Succession was already universal, like the 
observance of Sunday and the baptism of households. You 
might as well reason that the Scriptures leave the worship 
of Christ, and the observance of Sunday, and the communion 
of females, and the baptism of infants, open questions : as say 
(and we have heard Presbyterians say) that they leave the 
government of the Church " an open question." On the con- 
trary, on all these subjects the Apostles must have established 
a precedent one way or the other before they wrote the Scrip- 
tures, and we have no right, without a new revelation or a 
prohibition in the New Testament which was afterwards 
written, to depart from their orders. It would be a very 
suspicious circumstance indeed, if St. John, writing in the 
year 96 to the seven Churches of Asia,, should exhort them 
to set over them an apostle or angel, for this would imply 
that hitherto they had been Presbyterian : but if he had long 
previously placed over each of them an angel or apostle, (as 
Tertullian tells us the beloved and venerable Polycarp was 
placed by him over the Church of Smyrna,) then each Epistle 
to the Angel of each Church is in perfect keeping with the 
fact. Let us now see, if this evidence of allusion to existing 
facts do not demonstrate the Episcopacy, in the very best 
way possible ; as it does the observance of Sunday, the 
baptism of infants, or the universal worship of Christ. I 
shall now repeat the issue as it was now presented to my 
mind : — If it was intended that the twelve original Apostles 
should have successors in their office, it is quite probable 
that the appointments would in some instances have been 



394 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



made before the New Testament was written, and I may 
therefore reasonably expect to find in it occasional allusions 
to the Apostolic office in the persons of others, and incidental 
language or phraseology difficult of explanation on any other 
theory. I may even find Epistles written to men as- they 
were about succeeding to Apostolic powers. Now is this the 
fact 1 Episcopalians say it is. Let us see. 

I had been, I must confess, not unfrequently struck, in 
reading the New Testament, with a glimpse of official powers 
assumed by the Apostles, entirely aside from their miracles 
and tongues and witnessing the resurrection. I determined, 
therefore, to read attentively large portions at a time, to 
satisfy myself whether these allusions to a state of things 
already existing in the Church, justified the claims of Pres- 
bytery, of Popery, or of Prelacy. And before I laid the 
Scriptures down, I became overwhelmingly satisfied that both 
Popery and Presbytery entirely fail to account for and har- 
monize the ecclesiastical phenomena on the face of Scripture. 
Up to this time — nor do I believe my case to have been 
singular in this respect — I had never in my whole life con- 
descended to read (except as quoted into hostile writings) a 
single word in defence of the Episcopacy. 

" The twelve," " the twelve apostles," " the twelve apostles 
of the Lamb," — " figures cannot lie," — the number was mani- 
festly " twelve," — not one more — not one less : it was the 
" Preshyterianismi stantis vel cadentis articulus? But if I 
chance, said I, to find that the Bible recognizes even one over 
and above this number, then must the superstructure fall 
with the foundation. 

I suppose the household phrase " the twelve," had some- 
thing to do in suggesting this mode of reasoning. But how 
unreasonable would it be, because we read of " the twelve 
patriarchs,"* to suppose there were no others invested with 

* Acts, vii. 8. 



THE TEUE ISSUE. 



395 



this venerable name ? Or, because we read of " the seven,"* 
nearly thirty years after the ordination of the Deacons at 
Jerusalem, that " the seven" were to be the only Deacons in 
the universal Church ? Therefore, as we read of " the patriarch 
Abraham," and of " Deacons" innumerable : and the appel- 
lations ' ; patriarch" and " Deacon" were restricted neither to 
" the twelve" nor to " the seven :" so we may find, upon 
inquiry, that " the twelve" is but a designation which attached 
to the first Apostles, as " the seven" was a designation of the 
first Deacons. Therefore " to the law and to the testimony." 
" Now the names of the twelve Apostles are these : 

1. The first, Simon who is called Peter, 

2. And Andrew his brother ; 

3. James the son of Zebedee, 

4. And John his brother ; 

5. Philip, 

6. And Bartholomew ; 

7. Thomas, 

8. And Matthew the publican ; 

9. James the son of Alphseus, 

10. And Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus ; 

11. Simon the Canaanite, called also Zelotes, 

12. And Judas Iscariot." 

One of thtse soon perished ; but the office he had borne 
was not to perish with him. Immediately upon his death, 
the Eleven, after solemn invocation of the Divine direction, 
chose Matthias to take the place of Judas. Dr. Miller 
himself says of this transaction, " When Judas fell by trans- 
gression, -measures were immediately taken to appoint 
another, thus showing that a succession in the ministry was to 
be kept up." Notice the Doctor's language, " a succession 
in the ministry." Mark the language of Scripture, " that he 
may take part of this ministry and apostleship ;" and again, 

* Acts, xxi. 8. 



396 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



" he was numbered with the eleven apostles."* Here then, 
on the very first page of ecclesiastical history, it is evident 
that one of the twelve had a successor, and in circumstances 
that seem intended to establish the fact of an imperishable 
succession in the line of the Apostles. There are consider- 
ations that give force to this opinion. Forty days had 
elapsed since the vacancy had occurred. During those forty 
days our Lord was " going in and out among them, speaking 
of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God ;" and if we 
examine the nature of these interviews, we find them mainly 
occupied with the powers of the ministry ; the sacraments ; 
and the Church, or "the kingdom of God." Yet all this 
while that " He went in and out among them," He did not 
appoint a successor to Judas ; but as soon as He ascended, 
his Apostles entered into the election. No reasonable man 
can imagine that they proceeded proprio motu to this import- 
ant act. No man can suppose that the Lord had taught them 
that their number was never to be increased, or that, when the 
reapers should fall one by one in the field, their girdle and 
sickle should descend in no instance to another. It is evident 
that, if the Eleven were Presbyterians when the Master left 
them, it would no more have entered their mind to ordain a 
successor to an Apostle, to clothe him with equal prerogative 
and dignity, than to elect and ordain a successor to the office 
of the Master. And there is no escaping the conclusion, 
except on the rationalistic ground taken by Dr. Snodgrass, 
that the whole thing was wrong, and was owing to the 
" characteristic precipitation of Peter." We stop then to 
renew our list. 

1. Simon Peter. 

2. Andrew. 

3. James, the son of Zebedee. 

4. John. 

* Acts, i. 25, 26. * 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



397 



5. Philip. 

6. Bartholomew. 

7. Thomas. 

8. Matthew. 

9. James, the son of Alphseus. 

10. Lebbaeus or Thaddaeus. 

11. Simon Zelotes. 

12. Judas Iscariot. 

13. Matthias. 

The charm is broken. Thirteen is said to be a fatal num- 
ber. Certainly it is fatal to Presbyterianism. 

But we turn a few leaves further in the record, and find a 
new and shining light added to the constellation of " the 
twelve," which, it was alleged, was no more to be increased 
than the signs of the zodiac: A vulture with uplifted talon 
pouncing on the fold, is transformed into a lamb ; a scofTer 
into a believer ; a reviler into a preacher ; a tentmaker into 

• an Apostle : and Saul, once " breathing out threatenings and 
slaughter against the disciples of the Lord," now writes his 
name, "Paul an Apostle of Jesus Christ." Unless then St. 
Paul, as the eleven would seem to have done before, misap- 
prehended the fact that the number of the Twelve was not to 
be increased, we must here increase our register to fourteen. 
Fourteen Apostles — genuine, bona Jide, large-as-life Apostles 

, — one of them succeeding to an Apostle deceased, and another 
added as tlie growing exigencies of the Church required it. 
If it be alleged that Paul was miraculously called to be an 
Apostle, we answer that Matthias was chosen- by the agency 
of the Apostles, without the least intimation of a miracle. 
And if it be alleged that, at the election of Matthias, St. Peter 
said, " Of these men which have companied with us all the 
time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, begin- 
ning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that He 
was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness 

34 



398 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



with us of His resurrection :" it is evident that St. Paul did 
not company with them one hour of that time. Nevertheless, 
as broad and complete a mantle falls upon Matthias and 
Paul, as upon the original M Twelve." 

And there is yet another. Barnabas is twice called an 
Apostle, and is continually spoken of in terms that preclude 
the idea of his being any thing less. His name is constantly 
associated with that of St. Paul ; and generally takes the 
precedence, where the two are named together. If the 
brethren at Antioch send relief to the Church in Judea, they 
do it " by the hands of Barnabas and Saul."* " Barnabas and 
Saul returned from J erusalem, when they had fulfilled their 
ministry."! M ^ e Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas 
and Saul. "J He is sent forth with Paul on apostolical 
journeys.§ Barnabas is dispatched, to Antioch, as oiie of 
superior dignity to the u prophets and teachers" already 
there ; just as Peter and John were sent to the converts of 
Philip in Samaria. Considerably further in the history, | we 
find Barnabas undertakes an earnest dispute with Paul, 
remonstrating against his severity on Mark, " and the con- 
tention was so sharp between tljem, that they departed 
asunder one from the other;" which is unintelligible as an 
occurrence between a mere Presbyter and an inspired Apos- 
tle : especially if our reasoning with the Romanists be just, 
that Paul's taking Peter publicly to task, and " withstanding 
ham to the face," and rebuking him M before them all,"^f 
justifies the conclusion that St. Paul was not a whit behind 
the chiefest of the Apostles. At Lystra, Barnabas is taken 
for the chief divinity, and Paul for the inferior. The holy 
synod at Jerusalem u kept silence, and gave audience to 
Barnabas and Paul ;" where, as usual, Barnabas takes pre- 



* Acts, xi. 30. 
t lb. xiii. 2. 
I lb. XT. 39. 



t lb. xii. 25. 

§ lb. xi.22,30; xiii. 4. 

T GaL ii. 11, 14. 



THE TKUE ISSUE. 



399 



cedence. The same synod speak in their letter of "- our 
beloved Barnabas and Paul, men that have hazarded their 
lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." Again,* 
" when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, 
perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me 
and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go 
unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision." Nor is 
this the only intimation in this chapter of the footing of perfect 
equality with the other Apostles on which St. Barnabas stood. 
But, say you, " We must have further evidence ; we should 
like to see the place where Barnabas is called an Apostle." 
Well, you shall see more than you have asked : you shall 
see three such places. Read carefully this passage, f " Have 
we not power to eat and to drink % Have we not power to 
lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other [Gr. the rest of 
the] Apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas ? 
Or I only and Barnabas, have not we power to forbear 
working ?" Can any man in his senses, or out of his senses, 
tell us why Barnabas, who is not mentioned again in the 
whole Epistle, should be named in this connection, unless 
he were an Apostle as well known as St. Paul, and as well 
entitled to the support of the Church at large 1 Turn now 
m to another place : \ " The priest of Jupiter . . . brought 
oxen and garlands, and would have done sacrifice with the 
people. Which when the Apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard 
of, they rent their clothes," and so on. Turn again to yet 
another text :§ " But the multitude of the city was divided : 
and part held with the Jews, and part with the Apostles" 
[Barnabas and Paul.] We are told too that Barnabas and 
Paul went to Antioch, and Cyprus, and Salamis, and Perga, 
and Antioch in Pisidia, and to Iconium, and Lystra, and 
Derbe, and again over the same ground, and back to the 



* Gal. ii. 9. 

X Acts, xiv. 12-14. 



+ 1 Cor. ix. 4-6. 
§ Acts, xiv. 4. 



400 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



other Antioch, " confirming the disciples" and " ordaining 
elders in every city," while the subordination of the other 
clergy is recognized in the fact that throughout this tour, 
they had John, whose surname was Mark, for " their minis- 
ter.^* I have adduced this tedious array of facts and phrase- 
ology, to show how thoroughly the Episcopacy is interwoven 
with the whole texture of the New Testament, and to save 
the trouble of going, in other eases, into the same details to 
show the apostolical pre-eminence of others, of whom like 
language is continually held. It is time to amend the cat- 
alogue. 

1. Peter. 

2. Andrew. 

3. James, son of Zebedee. 

4. John. 

5. Philip. 

6. Bartholomew. 

7. Thomas. 

8. Matthew. 

9. James, son of Alphseus. 

10. LebbsBus or Thaddseus. 

11. Simon Zelotes. 

12. Judas Iscariot. 

13. Matthias. 

14. Paul. 

15. Barnabas. 

I once asked an excellent Presbyterian divine, (who was 
taking me pleasantly to task for my conversion to the ancient 
Faith,) how he could maintain that the Apostles had no 
successors : when scarcely had our Lord left them to cany 
out His will, before they set about apostle-making, and made 
Matthias as the thirteenth Apostle 1 What think you, Epis- 
copal reader, was his answer ? Why, precisely that which 

* Acts, xiii. 5. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



401 



Dr. Snodgrass gave in his book two years afterwards: 
that the Apostles acted prematurely, and made a mistake ; 
because they were commanded (as he interpreted it) to 
remain quietly in J erusalem until they should receive in- 
structions from on high. Very well. Go on. But, Gentle- 
men, if a thirteenth Apostle puts you thus to your wit's end, 
what will you do with the fifteenth ? Remember, we have 
now fifteen ! Poor Barnabas of Cyprus ! I found thee a 
sorry son of consolation in the hour of need ! And in vain 
did I fly to Jerome, for Jerome made Barnabas the equal 
of Paul ; saying of Titus, that he had " not yet attained to the 
same rank (eundem gradum) which Barnabas held, and Paul."* 
The charm by which " the Twelve" had held me being now 
broken, I felt less interest in contradicting the claims of 
others to the apostolic dignity ; for if there might be fifteen 
Apostles, there might now, for aught I could see or care, be 
fifteen hundred. So, turning to Scripturef I found it said, 
" Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellow- 
prisoners, who are of note among the Apostles, who also 
were in Christ before me ;" and I could not for my life per- 
ceive that either in Greek or English the passage would bear 
any other straight-forward, above-board meaning, than that 
Andronicus and Junia were Apostles. If St. Paul, after 
placing Timothy and Titus over the churches of Ephesus and 
Crete, had written to the good people in those places, " Salute 
Timothy and Titus, who are of note among the Presbyters" 
I trow we should not soon have heard the last of it. When 
we say that Washington was of note among the Presidents ; 
or that Augustus was of note among the Emperors ; that 
Herodotus was of note among Historians ; or that Homer 
was of note among the Poets ; that Stephen was of note 
among the Deacons ; or that Peter was of note among the 
Twelve : the whole world at once perceives our meaning. To 

* S. Hieron, Comm. on Gal. ii. t Rom. xvi. 7. 

34* 



402 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



the-silly cavil that Junia may have been a woman, it is suffi- 
cient to say, that Luther and Calvin both make the name (in 
the nominative) Junias ; that the learned Grecians, Robinson 
and Stuart, allow it to be the name of a man ; and that 
Calvin* admits that " Paul himself, indeed, in one place 
giveth this name to Andronicus and Junias, whom he saith 
to have been notable among the Apostles.'''' Even Neander 
allows them the title of Apostles, in a " secondary" sense. 
And the fact related of them, that they had been carried off 
to Rome, and had preceded St. Paul in their imprisonment, 
as they had done in their conversion, is certainly an intimation 
that they had filled important spheres, and had been con- 
spicuous offenders in the eye of the heathen law. If they 
were Apostles, the language is such as we should have ex- 
pected St. Paul to use. If they were not, Junia must be 
changed into "Julia;" or Apostles must here mean "mes- 
sengers;" or some other device must be resorted to, to 
explain a natural and graceful salutation ! And this is our 
position all along : that the entire New Testament finds a 
natural interpretation, only on the hypothesis that the Church 
was Episcopal, and that any further conjecture requires for- 
cings and twistings and strainings innumerable. 

In like manner, I found Epaphroditus called the Apostle 
of the Church at Philippi.f " I supposed it necessary to 
send to you Epaphroditus, my brother, and companion in 
labor, and fellow-soldier, but your messenger" [in the Greek, 
your Apostle~\. And St. Paul uses just the language that 
we should expect from him toward his equal : " my brother ;" 
" my companion in labor ;" " my fellow-soldier," " but your 
Apostle ;" " he longed after you all, and was full of heaviness, 
because ye had heard that he had been sick ;" " receive him 
therefore in the Lord with all gladness, and hold such in rep- 
utation" This is addressed too, not only to the saints at 

* Instit. B. iv. t Philipp. ii. 25. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



403 



Philippi, but " to the Bishops and Deacons ;" and it is to 
Presbyter-Bishops and Deacons that he says of Epaphroditus, 
" my brother and companion," and " your Apostle ;" and 
again, " receive him in all gladness, and hold such in repu- 
tation." Toward the end of the Epistle, too,* he apostro- 
phizes some one, and probably Epaphroditus, in terms 
(" True yoke-fellow") that appear to recognize Apostolical 
equality. Germanus dictus est nomine qui erat Compar officii, 
says Jerome. Here then was another Apostle on my hands. 
I went for consolation to sundry of the Fathers : but the 
Fathers with one voice insisted that I must leave it as St. 
Paul had left it, for Epaphroditus was the Apostle of the 
Church at Philippi. Theodoret, an accurate writer of the 
fifth century, replied, to my inquiries, tha*» " Epaphroditus 
was called the Apostle of the Philippians, because he was 
entrusted with the Episcopal government, as being their 
Bishop ; for those whom we now call Bishops were more 
anciently called Apostles" What could I do ? I reme^mbered, 
after some misgiving, that there was a Father contempo- 
raneous with Theodoret, who, according to Dr. Miller, would 
give me comfort, if any of them could. But even Jerome 
spoke out to me in his rude, blunt way : 

" Paulatim vero, tempore proce- " But by degrees, in process of 

dente.et alii, ab his quos Dominus time, others also were ordaimd 

elegerat, ordinati Apostoli ; sicut Apostles, by those whom the Lord 

ille ad Philippenses sermo decla- had chosen ; as that passage to 

rat, dicens, Necessarium existimavi the Philippians declares, which 

Epaphroditum fratrem, co-opera- saith, I supposed it necessary to 

torem, et commilitonem meum, send to you Epaphroditus, my bro- 

vestrum autem Apostolum, et mi- ther, my companion in labor, and 

nistrum necessitatis meae, mittere fellow-soldier, but your Apostle, 

ad vos. Et ad Corinthianos de tali- and he that ministered to my wants, 

bus scribitur, Sive Apostoli eccle- Also to the Corinthians it is writ- 

eiarum, gloria Christi." ^ ten concerning such, 4 They are the 

• Philipp. ir. 3. 



404: 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Apostles [in our English version 
"messengers"] of the Churches, 
and the glory of Christ.' " 

Accordingly I gave it up, that Epaphroditus was an un- 
deniable Apostle. 

The next that troubled me was St. James. Soon after the 
martyrdom of James the brother of John, by King Herod, 
another James makes his appearance, and becomes con- 
spicuous in the Church of Jerusalem. He sends forth an 
Epistle General " to the Twelve Tribes which are scattered 
abroad." He closes the debate in the venerable council of 
" Apostles and Presbyters and Brethren" in Jerusalem, by a 
final and authoritative judgment, " Wherefore my sentence 
is, that we troupe not," &c. ; on which Luther (approved by 
Neander) remarks that the Apostles, after a frank discussion, 
in which Peter and others took part, were willing to leave 
the decision to James, as a generous-minded man, and the 
representative of the Jewish interest. The brethren who 
bore the decisions of the Council to the Churches, are after- 
ward thus spoken of by St. Paul :* " For before that certain 
came [not from those Apostles and Elders, but] from James, 
he [Peter] did e*at with the Gentiles." Again ; St. Paul 
says, " James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars ;"f 
thus allowing, throughout, the precedence to St. James. 
When St. Peter went to the house " where many were gath- 
ered together praying," and declared how the Lord had 
brought him out of prison : not finding St. James among 
them, he said, " Go, show these things to James and to the 
brethren." J And twenty years afterward, when St. Paul and 
his company visited Jerusalem : " the day following, Paul 
went in with us unto James, and all the Presbyters were pre- 
sent.'^ And it is remarkable that, up to the ordination of 
the Deacons and the settlement of the Church in Jerusalem, 
* Gal. iL 12. t lb. verse 9. % Acts, xii. 17. § lb. xxi. 18. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



405 



St. Peter had always taken the lead : but from that time he 
gives precedence, in every thing relating to that Church, to 
St. J ames. Moreover, all antiquity agrees that this James was 
Bishop of the Church at Jerusalem ; as Clement of Alexan- 
dria, at the close of the second century declares : " After the 
ascension of Christ, Peter, James, and John did not contend 
for the honor of presiding over the Church at Jerusalem, but, 
with the rest of the Apostles, chose James the Just to be the 
Bishop of that Church." 

Now this James, according to St. Paul, was an Apostle : 
for " other of the Apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's 
brother." But, on further inquiry, I saw reason to suppose 
that the James here mentioned was not one of " the Twelve." 
Many Presbyterians and Congregationalists* are of this opin- 
ion. Neander, who would not easily allow it, as it weighs 
heavily against his exceedingly loose ideas of ecclesiastical 
rule in the primitive Church, is, nevertheless, constrained to 
allow that " the question is one of the most difficult in the 
Apostolic history ; " and a doubt, admitted by an author of 
Neander's views on a point like this, is almost equivalent to 
demonstration. That this James was not James the brother 
of John, is clear : for he is spoken of in the Acts for twenty 
years after that Apostle's martyrdom. And that he was not 
James the son of Alpheeus, appears from the following among 
many reasons : (1.) It may be doubted whether one of " the 
Twelve," who had received a commandment from the Master's 
lips to " go into all the world, and preach the Gospel," would 
have been content to spend the thirty remaining years of his 
life in Jerusalem. (2.) This James is called "our Lord's 
brother," and St. Matthew,* after naming the two Jameses 
among the Twelve, represents the Jews as saying, " Is not his 
mother called Mary 1 and his brethren, James, and Joses, and 
Simon, and Judas ? And his sisters, are they not all with us ?" 

* Matthew, xiii. 55, 56. 



406 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



(3.) In the last half-year before our Saviour suffered, his 
brethren urged Him to quit Galilee, and return to his dis- 
ciples ; and St. John adds, " For neither did His brethren 
believe in Him." (4.) Before this, we are told by three of 
the Evangelists, that when Jesus was in a house with his 
disciples, " His mother and His brethren stood without." (5.) 
St. Paul speaks of " the other Apostles, and the brethren of the 
Lord," as different individuals."* (6.) In St. Matthew, f we 
read of " Mary the mother of James and Joses" as witnessing 
the crucifixion, and in St. John,]; we find at the Cross " Mary 
the wife of Cleophas" with the two other Maries : so that 
they who make this James to have been one of " the Twelve," 
are obliged to make the Cleophas of St. John the Alphaeus 
of the other Evangelists, and to suppose that St. Mark has 
called the same person by these different names. (7.) In the 
Book of the Acts,§ after naming " the Eleven," St. Luke 
informs us that " These all continued with . . . . Mary 
the mother of Jesus, and with His brethren" (8.) There 
seems a special design in distributing the thr^e titles, " James 
the son of Zebedee and brother of John," "James the son of 
Alphseus," and " James the Lord's brother." (9.) The 
character of this James, as being so singularly ascetic, and 
a Nazarite from the womb, does not comport with the repu- 
tation that " the Twelve" had borne^ among the Pharisees. 
(10.) And as it is so much easier and more natural to con- 
found this James with James the son of Alphseus, than to 
separate them, the very fact that so many of the ancients did 
distinguish them, is very good evidence that the persons 
were, in fact, distinct. Clemens of Alexandria, in the age 
next to that of the Apostles, declares, as we have seen, that 
" Peter and James and John, did not contend for the honor 
of presiding over the Church of Jerusalem, but with the rest 



* 1 Cor. ix. 5. 

X St. John, xix. 25. 



t St. Matt, xxvii. 56. 
§ Acts, i. 14. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



407 



of the Apostles chose James the Just to be the Bishop of that 
Church." Once more in my despair, I sought refuge in the 
ever " famous Jerome," but once more the unfeeling Pres- 
byter repulsed me, saying, in his commentary on the passage, 
" Other of the Apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's 
brother :" - 



" Quod autem, exceptis duode- 
cim, quidam vocentur Apostoli, 

<fcc Paulatim vero,tempore 

procedente, et alii ab his quos Do- 
minus elegerat, ordinati Apostoli, 
<fcc.," as before quoted. 



" But that others besides the 
twelve may be called Apostles, 

&c But by degrees, in 

process of time, others also were 
ordained Apostles by those whom 
the Lord had chosen, <fcc," as be- 
fore quoted. 



And equally little consolation did I find in turning to his 
biographical account of James, who, he says, " after the pas- 
sion of the Lord, was immediately ordained by the Apostles, 
the Bishop of Jerusalem," (post passionem Domini, statim 
ab Apostolis Hierosolymorum Episcopus ordinatus;) and 
that he governed (rexit) the Church of Jerusalem for thirty 
years. And elsewhere Jerome calls this James " the thir- 
teenth Apostle" 

Really this was too bad. I asked for bread, and he gave 
me a stone. I could hardly believe my eyes. But there it 
was, most unmistakably conceded, that the Twelve were but 
the pioneers and ordainers of a whole host of Apostles. And 
now my catalogue runs thus: 

1. Peter. 

2. Andrew. 

3. James, brother of John. 

4. John. 

5. Philip. 

6. Bartholomew. 

7. Thomas. 

8. Matthew. 



408 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



9. James, the son of Alphseus. 

10. Lebbseus or Thaddseus. 

11. Simon Zelotes. 

12. Judas Iscariot. 

13. Matthias. 

14. Paul. 

15. Barnabas. 

16. Andronicus 

17. Junias. 

18. Epaphroditus. 

19. James the Just, the Lord's brother. 

Even if the last were one of the twelve, I was very little 
better off : for all the ancients, to a man, had allowed that, 
agreeably to the usages of the Primitive Church, he might 
ha^e been a layman, converted about the time of our 
Saviour's passion, elevated by ordination to the Apostleship. 
And, whoever he was, all concurred with Jerome in giving 
him a fixed Diocese, for thirty years, over the Model Church 
of Jerusalem ; and a local*«authority- to which even Peter and 
Paul did homage. 

If in the Church there was a man likely to be promote^ to 
the Apostolic Order, it was the admirable youth, who, from 
a child, had known the Holy Scriptures — the companion and 
bosom-friend of St. Paul. Accordingly we find Timothy in 
due time an Apostle, as it is written, " When we might have 
been burdensome, as the Apostles of Christ"* For the phra- 
ses, " our hearts" j- and " our own souls "^ show that St. Paul 
speaks for Silvanus and Timothy, as, in fact, he seldom 
speaks in the singular number in any part of the Epistle, and 
not at all until the nineteenth verse of the second chapter. 
And this explains why Timothy is associated with St. Paul 
in writing six of the Apostolical Epistles, in some of which 
the authoritative tone is distinctly made use of in the plural 
* 1 Thess. ii. 6. t lb. verse 4. $ lb. verse 8. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



409 



form. And wherever he is named, in these or the other 
Epistles, it is in a way that is easiest explained on the sup- 
position that he was raised to the Apostleship, and for that 
reason entitled, as much as St. Paul, to the support and obe- 
dience of the Churches. And when to all this I came to add 
the Epistles to Timothy himself, and to superadd the voice of 
all antiquity, it expresses less than I felt, to say, that I had 
no longer the shadow of a shade of doubt. From the time 
of his settlement in the Church of Ephesus, we never find 
him absent from his charge, except on the invitation of 
St. Paul, to visit him once more before he suffered. Leav- 
ing then out of view his previous high relations to other 
Churches, what was the nature of his charge at Ephesus ? 

Now, if the Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy were written 
to an Apostle, we may reasonably expect to find in them still 
further intimations of Apostolic prerogatives and powers. 
Let us see. 

In Chap, i., after the salutation, his first words are " I be- 
sought THEE to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into 
Macedonia, that THOU mightest charge some that they teach 
no other doctrine :" thus devolving on Timothy the function 
that would otherwise have belonged to himself, if he had not 
been called away elsewhere. " This charge I commit unto 
thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which went be- 
fore on thee ;" intimating that the vocation to his present 
work had been an event grave enough for the interposition 
of prophecy. 

In Chap. ii. he instructs him carefully concerning the na- 
ture and subjects of the prayers or liturgies of the Church to 
which he was now sent ; and also how the wpmen should be- 
have in private life, and in ecclesiastical assemblies. 

In Chap. iii. he " charges" Timothy, at considerable length, 
with regard to the proper qualifications of the inferior Bish- 
ops : " A bishop must be blameless, the husband of one wife, 

35 



410 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to 

teach, one that ruleth well his own house, not 

a novice, must have a good report of them which are 

without." He then charges him with equal care respecting 
those to be admitted Deacons, and respecting their wives and 
children, and recommends their promotion when they " have 
used the office of a deacon well." 

In Chap. iv. he reminds Timothy of the sad prediction of 
the Spirit, that " some should depart from the faith, giving 
heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils ;" and char- 
ges him to put the brethren in remembrance thereof : and 
adds, " These things command and teach." 

On the subject of discipline and of provision for the poor, 
he recommends in the next chapter moderation and prudence, 
towards old and young, male and female, married and un- 
married. After some directions, relating apparently to use- 
ful institutions, giving employment to females in the Church's 
service, and also to the subject of marriage, he says concern- 
ing another matter that Timothy must look after, " Let the 
Presbyters that rule well be counted worthy of double honor, 
especially they who labor in the Word and doctrine ;" for 
" the laborer is worthy of his reward." But " against a Pres- 
byter receive not an accusation, but before two or three wit- 
nesses and, " them that sin rebuke before all, that others 
also may fear. I charge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things, 
without preferring one before another, doing nothing by par- 
tiality. Lay hands suddenly on no man." 

In Chap. vi. he gives directions concerning the duties to 
be required by servants ; and, after a renewed allusion to 
false teachers, and some counsels pertinent to the occasion, 
he exclaims once more, with great solemnity : "I give thee 
charge in the sight of God, who quickeneth all things, and be- 
fore Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



411 



good confession ; that thou keep this commandment without 
spot, unrebukeable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus 
Christ." And yet once more, when we had thought that all 
he had to say was said, his full soul bursts again with its 
anxieties : " O Timothy, keep that which is committed to 
thy trust !" 

Again, in a second Epistle, he says to Timothy, " Stir up 
the gift of God, which is m thee by the putting on of my 
hands ;" " Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast 
heard of me ;" " That good thing which was committed unto 
thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us " The 
things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, 
the same commit THOU to faithful men, who shall be able to 
teach others also ;" " Of these things put them (the Presby- 
ters) in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that 
they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subvert- 
ing of the hearers." Then, solemnly recurring to the perilous 
times they were to look for, he exclaims again, " I charge 

thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, 

preach the "Word ; be instant in season, out of season ; re- 
prove, rebuke, exhort, with all long suffering and doctrine ; 

do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy 

ministry. For I am now ready to be offered, and the time 
of my departure is at hand." 

Thus with his dying hand the venerable St. Paul delivers 
up the keys to a successor in his office. What single thing 
was there that St. Paul could have done in the Church at 
Ephesus, which Timothy is not here instructed to do 1 And 
pray where is it that mere Presbyters, so often addressed in 
other Epistles, ever received any such injunctions as these ? 

Timothy is sent to Ephesus to ordain Presbyters and 
Deacons. Yet, for years before, the Church there had its 
Presbyters; and, what is yet more singular, although we 
have a discourse of St. Paul's, addressed to them when he 



412 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



sent for them to meet him at Miletus, as recorded at consid- 
erable length in Acts xx., yet in that address — that solemn 
address, that parting address to the Presbyters at Ephesus, 
" hanging on Paul's neck, and sorrowing most of all that they 
should see his face no more" — he says not a word about 
"charging," "reproving," "rebuking," or "receiving accusa- 
tions against" each other, even although he told them, " Yea, 
of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, 
to draw away disciples after them ;" and again, " I know that 
after my departing, shall grievous wolves enter in among 
you, not sparing the flock." There is here not one word con- 
cerning discipline, as there had been none concerning ordina- 
tion: but only, " Take heed unto yourselves, and to the jlock, 

to feed the Church of God, which He hath purchased 

with His own blood." But when these evils begin actually 
to appear, and these wolves commence their havoc of the fold, 
and Timothy is sent to them, because St. Paul cannot go : it 
is with the anointing oil, the rod, and the sword. The question 
has been well put, Had these Presbyters the same power to 
" receive an accusation against" Timothy, that he had against 
them'? or to "rebuke" him, that he had to rebuke them % or 
to " charge" Timothy, " that he teach no other doctrine." 
even as he had " by prophecy" and " the laying on of Paul's 
hands," to "charge" them'? 

These Epistles to Timothy require such interminable strain- 
ing and forcing, into a sense so entirely non-natural, in order 
to get rid of the Episcopal prerogative, that some more skil- 
ful Presbyterians, who have felt the pressure, and who can, 
a la Hudibras, 

" divide 

A hair 'twixt south and southwest side," 

have fallen on the expedient of allowing Timothy a delegated 
authority to act temporarily in the place of Paul, as a sort of 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



413 



iertium quid, or intermediate thing between the Presbyters 
at Ephesus and the Apostle.* 

Very well, have it so if you will : half-presbyter, half-apos- 
tle ; it can do no harm. It still makes Timothy a Bishop 
and Paul the Archbishop ; or, if we must call the Presbyters 
of Ephesus Bishops, it makes Timothy the Archbishop, and 
Paul the Patriarch. We care not by what name you call 
him — Priest, Presbyter, Bishop, Suffragan, Superintendent, 
Ruler, Governor, Evangelist, Missionary, Moderator, Primus 
Presbyter, Apostle, Assistant of the Apostle, Messenger, 
Prelate, Angel, Antistes, Princeps, Prseses, Propositus, Ar- 
chon, Proestos, or Prsefect, (as Calvin styles James in the 
Church at Jerusalem,) — call him by what name you please ; 
write it in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew ; read forward, read 
backward : it comes to the same thing ; Timothy succeeds to 
the prerogatives and powers of Paul — Paul now in irons at 
Rome, " his course finished," " the time of his departure at 
hand" — and Timothy to act henceforth " until the appearing 
of Jesus Christ" not by delegation in the place of an absent, 
but by succession in the place of a deceased Apostle. 

Turn we to the ancients 1 They call Timothy an " Apos- 
tle ;" and the Fathers, to the number of ten or twelve, name 
him as the successor of St. Paul in the Church at Ephesus. 
The words of the " famous" Jerome are, " Timotheus a Paulo 

* This Apostle-splitting, so to call it, reminds me of an anecdote with which Dr. 
Miller used to point his caution to our classes, against too fond an exhibition of 
our powers of strained and rigid exegesis. A Doctor of Divinity, it appears, occu- 
pying a Professor's chair in a literary institution, entered into one of those elabo- 
rate discussions which are sometimes heard from sectarian pulpits, to ascertain 
how many evil ones there were that passed out of the two men among the tombs, 
into the herd of swine ; and, after a long dissertation on the military tactics of the 
Romans, he came at last to the conclusion that, as the Roman Legion contained 
six thousand four hundred and seven men, and as the " legion" of evil ones was 
divided between the two men among the tombs, there must have been just three 
thousand two hundred and three and a half devils in each man: in consequence 
whereof, the learned Divine went afterward, among the beardless youths of the 
place, by the name of " Doctor Split-devil." 4 



414 



LOOKING FOR THE CHUKCH. 



Ephesiorum Episcopus ordinatus ;" and in his commentary on 
Philemon, Jerome makes not only Timothy, and Silvanus, 
and Sosthenes " Apostles," but inspired equally with St. Paul 
in writing the Epistles under their joint names ! Theodoret 
calls him " the Apostle of the Asians." Eusebius, the great 
historian of the Church, declares, " It is recorded in history 
that Timothy was the first Bishop of Ephesus" — over the 
Presbyter-Bishops, be it remembered, who were there before 
him. On this passage Dr. Bowden, in great good humor, 
takes Dr. Miller to task for one of those innocent mistakes 
to which the latter is so singularly prone, in translating the 
)tf<ropsTrai of Eusebius by the free rendering, "It is reported/" 
The idea that Eusebius — who lived within two centuries of 
the Apostles, who sat in the council of Nice assembled out 
of all the world, who had access to all the writings of his pre- 
decessors, who obtained a special order from Constantine that 
the records of all the churches in the Empire should be fur- 
nished him for the compilation of his history — the idea that 
Eusebius should have said of an event so recent and neces- 
sarily so well known, " It is reported that Timothy was or- 
dained Bishop of the Ephesians by Paul !" Is there no limit 
to new discoveries in Greek 1 

It will be now less necessary to go over the same ground 
with regard to Titus. » In the Epistle to him, immediately 
after the salutation, we find the Apostle beginning precisely 
as he had done to Timothy. 

TO TIMOTHY. TO TITUS. 

" I besought thee to abide still " For this cause left I thee in 
at Ephesus, when I went into Crete, that thou shouldst set in 
Macedonia, that thou mightest order the things that are wanting, 
charge some that they teach, <fcc" and ordain Presbyters in every 

city, as I had appointed thee." 

Now in Crete there were a hundred cities. It lay in the 
path of St. Paul and others in their frequent journeys west- 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



415 



ward. St. Paul had been there at least once, for there he 
left Titus. There were Cretans among the first who heard 
the Gospel on the day of Pentecost. The very phraseology, 
" that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting" 
shows that churches had been founded. The whole drift of 
the Epistle shows that there were Churches there, and 
Churches infested already with Judaizing and false teachers. 
Nor do I know any man but Dr. Miller who has been hardy 
enough to ask proof that there were Presbyters in the 
Churches of Ephesus and Crete before this time. I care not, 
except for the credit of common sense, whether there were or 
not. For here is the dilemma. If there were Presbyters in 
Crete before, Paul, a remarkable observer of professional pro- 
priety and etiquette, slights them entirely, and leaves his 
friend Titus among the Presbyteries of Crete for the purpose 
of ordaining. Dr. Potts, I trow, would take it for an ill- 
mannered thing, if the Presbytery of Philadelphia should 
send a man to ordain elders in the cities of New York. Or, 
if there were no Presbyters in Crete, still the one man Titus 
is left, in the place of the one man Paul who cannot stay 
longer, to " ordain elders in every city," and to " set in order 
the things that are wanting." Either way, Titus represents 
and succeeds the Apostle. 

St. Paul then charges him, as he had done Timothy, to or- 
dain as Bishops or Elders only such as he may find " blame- 
less, the husband of one wife, having faithful children, . . not 
self-willed, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not 
given to filthy lucre ; but lovers of hospitality, lovers of good 
men, sober, just, holy, — temperate, holding fast the faithful 
Word." As to false teachers, he tells him that their " mouths 
must be stopped," and "a man that is a heretic, after the 
first and second admonition, reject." The body of the Epis- 
tle, very like those to Timothy, is occupied with charges re- 
specting "aged men," "aged women," "young women," 



416 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



" young men," " servants," " the powers that be," and the 
local " magistrates." 

Now this pre-eminence of Titus in Crete is confirmed by 
the fact of his having on other occasions represented St. Paul, 
during the absence of that Apostle from some other Churches. 
Thus, twice he was sent to Corinth ; and St. Paul says of 
him * " His inward affection is more abundant toward you, 
whilst he remembereth the obedience of you all, how with fear 
and trembling ye received him." Again, in the next chapter, f 
" We desired Titus, that as he had begun, so he would also fin- 
ish in you the same grace also ;" and again,;]; " Thanks be to' 
God, which put the same earnest care into the heart of Titus 
for you ;" and again,§ " whether any do inquire of Titus, he 
is my partner and fellow-helper concerning you : or our breth- 
ren be inquired of, they are the Apostles [Gr.] of the 
Churches, and the glory of Christ. Wherefore show ye to 
them, (i. e., to Titus, Luke, &c.,) and before the Churches, the. 
proof of your love, and of our boasting on your behalf." 
And all this in so famous a Church as that of Corinth, re- 
nowned for its tongues, its prophets, and its pastors. 

Accordingly we find the whole regiment of Fathers allow- 
ing Titus the rank in Crete which we have seen them with 
one consent give to Timothy at Ephesus. In commenting on 
the second chapter of Galatians, where St. Paul recounts his 
visit to Jerusalem with Barnabas, having Titus also with 
them, and where James, and Cephas, and John, gave to him 
and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship, the " famous" 
Jerome, whose name our old Presbyterian habits oblige us 
to write always in capitals, remarks : • 

" Sed Tito, qui cum eis erat, " But to Titus, who was with 
dextras non dederunt ; necduni them, they gave not their right 
quippe ad earn mensuram perve- hands ; for he had not yet attained 



"* 2 Cor. vii. 15. 
t lb. Tiii. 16. 



X Verse 6. 
§ lb. 23. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



417 



nerat ut possint ei Christi merci- to that measure that the interests 
monia ex eequo cum majoribus of Christ should be intrusted to 
credi ; et eundem tenere negocia- him equally with his superiors, 
tionis locum quern Barnabas tene- and that he should hold the same 
bat et Paulus." rank of administration which Bar- 

nabas and Paul held." 

I noticed too, that St. Paul settled Titus in Crete with 
these high powers, as he had done Timothy in Ephesus, when 
now his race was well nigh run, and. he was about to loose 
his girdle and lay down his staff. 

And my attention was called, as the " famous" Jerome's 
had been a thousand years before me, to the further fact, 
that when St. Paul requested Timothy to leave his charge 
awhile and come and visit him, he sent Tychicus to Ephesus ;* 
and when he desired Titus to do the same thing, he sent 
Tychicus to Crete ;f it would appear to take their places in 
their absence : " When I shall send Artemas unto thee, or 
Tychicus, (called by Neander, Paul's " missionary assistant," 
and by Calvin, " the Bishop of the Colossians,") be diligent 
to come unto me." 

And yet once more, Silas or Silvanus, (for they are but 
two forms of the same name,) is a New Testament Apostle. 
In Acts xv., he and Judas are called " chief men among the 
brethren,"^ and " prophets,"§ as Barnabas and Saul had been 
on' a former occasion. He was, with Paul and Barnabas, 
charged with " the decrees" of the Synod of Jerusalem ;|| and 
of his own will remained at Antioch,*!" " confirming the breth- 
ren." # In the occurrences at Philippi,** he is constantly men- 
tioned as the equal of St. Paul. In the following chapter the 
same equality is still preserved. In another placef f he is as- 
sociated with St. Paul, and takes precedence of Timothy. In 

* 2 Tim. iv. 12. t Tit. iii. 12. 

$ lb. verse 22. , § lb. verse 32. 

| lb. verses 22, 25, 27. 1 lb. verse 34. 

** Chap. xvi. tt 2 Cor. i. 19. 



418 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH/ 



another,* the same circumstance occurs, with the additional im- 
portance that his authority is added in the address of the Epis- 
tle ; and in another,f Paul declares both him and Timothy to be, 
equally with himself, " Apostles," ready to impart not only 
the gospel, but also " their own souls," when they " might 
have been burdensome [marg., used authority^ as the Apos- 
tles of Christ." Again, in 2nd Thessalonians, we find Silas 
or Silvanus uniting with St. Paul and Timothy, in the Epistle 
wherein they say, " that ye both do, and will do, the things 
which we command you," J and " now we command you, breth- 
ren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw 
yourselves, &c."§ And again, " that we might not be charge- 
able to any of you ; not because we have not power, but to 
make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us."|| I 
marked especially the language, " When we might have been 
burdensome as the Apostles of Christ." 

In my despair I appealed once more to Jerome. But 
Jerome, on the passage " or our brethren be inquired of, they 
are the Apostles of the Churches, and the glory of Christ," 
says further : 

"Silas quoque et Judas ab " Silas also and Judas are called 
Apostolis Apostoli nominati sunt." Apostles by the Apostles." 

In the same manner the passage just quoted undenia- 
bly includes St. Luke, who went with Titus to Corinth, 
■* the brother whose praise is in the gospel throughout all the 
churches ; and not that only, but who was also chosen of 
the churches to travel with us ;"^[ the author moreover of a 
gospel, and of the Acts of the Apostles, albeit himself not by 
any means one of " the Twelve :" And to this agrees also 
the language of antiquity. Once more then the Catalogue : 



* 1 Thess. i. 1. 
J Chap. iii. 4. 
| lb. verses 8, 9. 



1 1 Thess. ii. 6, 8. 

§ lb. verse 6. 

^ 2 Cor. viii. 18, 19. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



419 



1. Peter. 

2. Andrew. 

3. James, the son of Zebedee. 

4. John. 

5. Philip. 

6. Bartholomew. 

7. Thomas. 

8. Matthew. 

9. James, the son of Alphseus. 

10. Lebbseus, or Thaddseus. 

11. Simon Zelotes. 

12. Judas Iscariot. 

13. Matthias. 

14. Paul. 

15. Barnabas. 

16. Andronicus. 

17. Junias. 

18. Epaphroditus. 

19. James, the Lord's brother. 
. 20. Timothy. 

21. Titus. 

22. Silas. 

23. Luke. 

It is really not the most pleasing thing in the world to 
confess one's former ignorance : 

Durum est 

Quae juvenes didicere, senes perdenda fateri. 

I did once believe that the Apostolic ^office had perished 
with St. J ohn, and that the Twelve had passed away without 
successors : nor can I give a better apology for my mistake, 
than that I had never thought the subject of sufficient import- 
ance to compare attentively Scripture with Scripture, con- 
sidering time more profitably employed in hunting for con- 



420 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



firmations of " the decrees of God, whereby for his own glory- 
he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass and that 
" none are redeemed by Christ but the elect only ;" and that 
" by the decrees of God, for the manifestation of his glory, 
some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, 
and others are foreordained to everlasting death," and that 
" those men and angels, (I still quote the Confession of Faith,) 
thus predestinated and foreordained, are particularly and un- 
changeably designed, and their number is so certain and defi- 
nite, that it cannot be increased or diminished." A merciful 
God forgive me, that some of the time thus wasted was not 
employed in finding the foundations of the Church's ancient 
unity, and peace, and triumphs! Then, too, had I been 
spared this confession. For so»soon as my investigations 
were directed to this point, I found the number of the origi- 
nal " Apostles" just doubling on my hands, and that almost 
exclusively in the path of St. Paul. 

I desire it to be remarked, that in the foregoing catalogue 
I have confined myself exclusively to such as are distinctly 
called in the New Testament "Apostles" and to whom an- 
tiquity allows both the name and the prerogative. There are 
other individuals named in the New Testament, as " compan- 
ions," "fellow-soldiers," "fellow-laborers," "fellow-helpers" 
of the Apostles, but not distinctly called Apostles, yet whom 
the early fathers speak of as " Apostles," or as successors to 
apostolic functions ; such as Dionysius the Areopagite, at 
Athens ; Gaius and Aristarchus, successively at Thessalonica ; 
Archippas at Colosse ; Antipas at Pergamos ; Crescens in 
Gallia or Galatia; Euodius at Antioch, (succeeded by Igna- 
tius ;) Linus and Clement at Rome ; Mark, Judas, &c, &c. 
These I have excluded from the catalogue, meaning to admit 
those only who are called "Apostles" in the Scriptures. If 
exception be taken to St. J ames, on the ground that he may 
have been one of " the Twelve," he can very well be spared : 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



421 



although, if the original Apostles were to have no successors, 
it is utterly unaccountable how others have been so intermixed 
with " the Twelve" that it was difficult even in ancient times 
to see the difference, and also how antiquity should have ever 
entertained the question whether this James had not been a 
layman up to the time of the Master's death. 

Of course, in this inquiry, I could not overlook the seven 
Epistles addressed by St. John to "the Angels of the 
Seven Churches." The words Angel and Apostle, both mean- 
ing "Messenger," are much more nearly synonymous than the 
names of " Presbyter and Bishop." And if the unusual met- 
aphor of " the Synagogue of Satan," occurring twice in these 
Epistles, indicate an allusion to the Jewish Synagogue, in 
which the chief officer or overseer was sometimes called the 
Angel : St. John may have had special reason for transfer- 
ring this title to the Eulers of these Churches. Moreover, 
these " Angels" are expressly affirmed by the ancients,* to 
have been individually the Presidents, Eulers, or Bishops of 
those Churches. But, more than all, St. J ohn addresses them 
as holding the keys of discipline, and as being responsible for 
the teaching allowed in their respective Churches. Eor ex- 
ample, the Angel of the Church at Ephesus, said by some of 
the ancients to have been Onesimus, (although by others sup- 
posed to have been Timothy,) is thus addressed, and with the 
highest commendations : " Thou hast tried them which say 
they are apostles and are riot, and hast found them liars 
and if a man can be tried only by his peers, we must allow 
the trier to have been himself an Apostle. And in the Epis- 
tle to the Angel of the Church at Smyrna, (agreed by all the 
ancients to have been Polycarp,) how affecting are the allu- 

* Especially by Irenaeus, who was personally acquainted with Polycarp, the one 
at Smyrna ; and by Ignatius, who names Onesimus as the one in his time at Eph- 
esus ; and by the reliable Eusebius, who was familiar with the very earliest; 
histories ; and by others down to the famous Jerome inclusively. 

36 . 



422 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



sions to his poverty and piety, and to the mournful persecu- 
tions about to befall his flock, and to the " crown of life" to 
which he was shortly to pass through the fires. So also to 
the " President" of the Church at Pergamos, he writes : " be- 
cause thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, 

so hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the 

Nicolaitanes." Again to another, " Thou sufferest that wom- 
an Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to 
seduce my servants." I could not resist the evidence, taken 
in connection with the powers of Titus, and especially of Tim- 
othy in one of these very Churches, that these Angels — call 
them, we say again, by what name you will — were individu- 
als, as responsible as ever St. Paul or St. Peter was for the 
condition of their churches, and for the doctrinal purity of 
the teachers. Doctor Mason's flaming capitals, in which he 
quotes the phrase " shall cast some of you into prison, that 
ye may be tried, &c, &c," to show that the Epistles are 
addressed to Presbyterians, is really too puerile to be consid- 
ered. St. Paul, in his Epistle to Titus, says, " Grace be 
with you all ;" Ignatius, in an Epistle written at this time 
and to this very Poly carp, speaks at first in the singular 
number, using among others that beautiful expression, " stand 
thou firm as an anvil when it is beaten :" but knowing the 
maxim of antiquity, " Ecclesia in Episcopo," he breaks out 
at last, in like manner, in the plural strain : " Labor ye one 
with another ; strive together ; run together ; suffer together ; 
let none of you be found a deserter ; .... be long suffer- 
ing towards each other." And Dr. Mason himself, writing to 
a brother minister in Philadelphia, might very well in these 
days have allowed himself to say : " Do send sound men to 
the next Assembly, for we hear with sorrow that some of you 
are tinctured with the new divinity." This miserable quib- 
bling, to which Blondel, and Cartwright, and Beza, and Gro- 
tius would not listen, is certainly, to our mind, altogether 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



423 



less manly than the bold suggestion of the " evangelical" Ne- 
ander, that these Epistles are addressed to Angels, in allusion 
to an Asiatic superstition that Angels presided over certain 
districts and provinces ; or his still bolder hypothesis that 
John the Apostle never wrote these Epistles at all ! 

It is unnecessary to pursue the succession further. Here 
is the catalogue, so far as we have gone : 

1. Peter. 

2. Andrew. 

3. James, son of Zebedee. 

4. John. 

5. Philip. 

6. Bartholomew. 

7. Thomas. 

. 8. Matthew. 
9. James, son of Alphaeus. 

10. Thaddssus. 

11. Simon Zelotes. 

12. Judas Iscariot. 

13. Matthias. 

14. Paul. 

15. Barnabas. 

16. Andronicus. 

17. Junias. 

18. Epaphroditus. 

19. James, the Lord's brother. 

20. Timothy. 

21. Titus. 

22. Silas. 

23. Luke. All these are called " Apostles ;" to whom add, 

24. Onesimus, or " Angel of the Church at Ephesus." 

25. Polycarpus, or " Angel of the Church at Smyrna." 

26. Successor of Antipas, " Angel of the Church at Perga- 
mos. 



424 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



27. Carpus, or " Angel of the Church at Thyatira. 

28. " Angel of the Church at Sardis." 

29. " Angel of the Church in Philadelphia." 

30. " Angel of the Church of the Laodiceans." 

" Well, really !" will exclaim the Presbyterian, " according 
to this, Apostles were not so rare on the earth as I had sup- 
posed." No, gentle reader, they were not so rare as you 
have been led to think ; for these we have found in the path 
of the succession of only St. Peter, and St. Paul, and St. 
John. How many more might, then, have been added to the 
list, if St. Luke had given us a record of the Churches planted 
by the rest of the Eleven ! — for, besides Peter, and James, 
and John, not one of the original Twelve (Jude perhaps 
excepted) is again noticed in the Scriptures after the day of 
Pentecost. We must take the " Acts" of these as an exam- 
ple of what was done by the others ; and, in fact, uninspired 
records of other churches (as in the Church of Syria, only 
discovered three centuries ago) have come down to us, in 
which the very same state of things is shown to have existed. 
No indeed! The apostolic office entered into the very 
constitution of the Church. " God hath set some in the 
Church ; first, Apostles ; secondarily, prophets ; thirdly, teach- 
ers " and he gave some Apostles ; and some prophets ; 
and some evangelists ; and some pastors and teachers," — till 
when 1 " Till we all come into the unity of the faith." 

No ! Apostles were not so scarce as we have heard. 
How absurd the question, " Are all Apostles V if it were a 
conceded thing that there had never been but Twelve 1 How 

absurd the charge* that " such are false apostles 

transforming themselves into the Apostles of Christ" if the 
Corinthians understood that no new Apostles of Christ were 
ever to be known ! How absurd the boasting of St. Paul,f 



* 2 Cor. xi. 13. 



t Gal. LI, 17. 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



425 



« 

that he was " an Apostle, not of men, neither by man,'''' " nei- 
ther went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles 
before me*" if no such thing were known in the whole world 
as one's being made an Apostle by " those that were Apostles 
before him !" What earthly meaning will they attach to the 
declaration,* " Thou (the Angel of the Church at Ephesus) 
hast tried them which say they are Apostles, and are not, and 
hast found them liars," f if it was understood, in the primitive 
Church, that the Apostles were to have " no successors 
The Angel of the Church at Ephesus had simply to say to 
any such intruder : " Sir, Peter is dead, and Paul is dead, and 
every body knows that the Apostles are all dead, save the 
beloved John. Whom makest thou thyself? Surely thou 
art mad ! The Church is Presbyterian ! THE APOSTLES, 
every body knows, EL\.VE NO SUCCESSORS !" Just as 
soon might men present themselves within the spiritual charge 
of Dr. Potts, or Mr. Barnes, or Mr. Boardman, claiming to 
be Apostles : as within the bounds of the " Moderator" of the 
Presbytery at Ephesus ! 

Alas ! now I was fairly driven out from my position Num- 
ber Three, which involves in fact the true issue between the 
Sect-makers and the Church. Thirty Apostles rising up in 
the path of but three of the Eleven ! Or, if the seven in 
Asia, who had power to try " false apostles," are to be omit- 

* Rev. ii. 2. 

•f- Among my classmates who have assailed the Church, is the Rev. Mr. Board- 
man, of Philadelphia, who chose this, I am informed, as the text of his Discourse 
to his congregation on this subject. To me it is one of those proofs— the more un- 
answerable as it is less intentional — that Apostles, both true and false, were so 
numerous as to create the necessity of caution, discrimination, and discipline. Can 
Mr. Boardman imagine that men rose up in Asia about a. t>. 95, claiming to be 
Apostles, when all the Apostles that were ever to exist, were dead, save one ? If I 
were preaching in reply to Mr. Boardman, I should desire no better text than this 
of his owu selection. I never saw the sermon. I can well suspect, however, that 
he took care not to tell his "people," that a claim to the apostleship was tried at 
Ephesus so late as a. d. 95 ! 

36* 



426 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



ted, because they have instead of Apostle the title of angel : 
then here were at least twenty-three; all, most distinctly, 
called by the very name APOSTLES f receiving such defer- 
ence as Peter and Paul and John received ; and sent to the 
Churches with power to ordain, to rule, to receive accusation 
against, and to silence the inferior bishops ; all antiquity, too, 
for more than three hundred years, taking the same view of a 
transmitted " apostleship ;" and not a heretic, writhing under 
an apostolical anathema, venturing to question it, until the 
days of Aerius; Episcopacy as universal as the name of 
Christ ; and so great the number of the true Apostles, that 
" false 1 ' ones cross their path, and even are able, like their 
predecessor Judas, to do mischief in the churches. It was 
the first time I had searched the Scriptures thoroughly upon 
this subject ; and this was the result. I saw it written with 
a sunbeam, that the number of Apostles was to be increased, 
and was increased, both by accession and by succession. If 
the apostolic office was thus to perish : much more that of 
Elders and Deacons, as the Quakers more justly reason, be- 
cause they had no promise nor injunction of perpetuity. But 
the promise of Christ is gloriously redeemed in an Apostolic 
Office, meant to be as perpetual as the most Holy Sacrament. 

" Lo, I am with you alway, even " As often as ye eat this bread, 
•unto the end of the world" and drink this cup, ye do show the 

Lord's death, till he come" 

So also it is written to Timothy, " The same commit thou to 
faithful men" .... "that thou keep this commandment until 
the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ." If the Presbyteri- 
ans are right in casting off the perpetuity of the Apostles, the 
Quakers, as I have said before, are much more right in casting 
off the perpetuity of the inferior ministry and the sacraments, 
as being necessary only in the elementary condition of the 
Church, to set it going. But delightful it is to know that, for 



THE TRUE ISSUE. 



427 



the first three hundred years, in which all other facts; not ex- 
cepting the Divinity of our Blessed Lord, were ruthlessly 
subjected to wild discussion : there was one fact, not only not 
contested, but not even discussed* — the succession in the line 
of the Apostles, unbroken, perpetual, and ever offering to the 
Christian world a tangible starting-point for the recovery of 
ancient unity and peace and love ; vindicating at the same 
time the ways of God, who has been consistent with himself 
in transferring to the Gentiles the Prelacy which he had 
established and preserved among the Jews. 



ADDENDUM. 

It cannot be supposed that I overlooked St. Paul's saying 
to Timothy, "Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which 
was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the 
hands of the Presbytery ;" for I felt for a long time con- 
cerning it, like the old lady, who was always satisfied with the 
sermon, if it had only in it " that sweet word Mesopotamia.'''' 
But to be grave : 

The learned Grotius declares he " would not allow himself 
to adduce this passage in proof of the custom, [of the Pres- 
byters laying on hands with those of the Bishop,] because 
Ambrose [Hilary] and Jerome, among the ancients, and 
Calvin, the chief of the moderns, interpret Presbytery here 
to mean the office to which Timothy was promoted." But let 
it mean the collection of persons that laid on hands : and 
even then, the Apostles are called Presbyters, so several of 
them acting together might well be called a Presbytery. And 

* Dr. Miller himself says, " No Father of the Church, for the first three hundred 
years, ever discussed the question of the Prelacy :" — admitted. And again, " Jerome 
at the close of the fourth century, was the first to discuss the question of parity." 
We beg the Doctor's pardon. Aerius, who denied his Lord, was the first known 
to the Church, who cavilled at the Episcopacy. 



428 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



so Ignatius, in their day, uses the word : #po<f(pvyuv <ry evay- 
ysXiu &>g tfapx/ 'I^tfou, xou <ro?£ 'AtfotfroXoig' kg rfpstffivrspiw 
exxXrfiiug — fleeing to the gospel as to the flesh of Jesus, and 
to the Apostles as the Presbytery of the Church." I could 
find the word in but two other places in the New Testament,* 
in both which it means the highest ecclesiastical court known 
to the Jewish Church ; and St. Luke and St. Paul, being 
companions, and the only persons that use the words at all : 
it seems to point to the highest ordaining power in the Chris- 
tian Church. Add to these considerations, that Paul the 
Apostle was certainly himself one of that Presbytery, for he 
says,f " Stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the put- 
ting on of my hands" Observe, moreover, that St. Paul 
ascribes no virtue whatever to " the hands of the Presbytery :" 
for he says, in the passage, " the gift that is in thee, which 
was given thee (Sia.) BY prophecy, (fjusr a) WITH the laying 
on of the hands of the Presbytery ;" and, in the other, "the 
gift of God, which is given thee, (Sia) BY the putting on of 
MY hands." The virtue is in the one ascribed solely to the 
" prophecy," and in the other solely to " the hands of Paul." 
That this transaction was accompanied with the hands of 
others — whether Apostles or Presbyters, consenting to the 
act of the consecration — is of no consequence whatever. St. 
Paul was to Timothy precisely what Timothy was to be to 
others in Ephesus — the ordaining power, the sine qua non. 

" But," say you, " Timothy is called an ' Evangelist.' " So 
is Philip the Deacon ; was Timothy, then, only a Deacon % 
St. Paul says, indeed, " Do the work of an evangelist :" but 
please to read on, " make full proof of thy ministry, (Gr. 
deaconship.)" Thus you play upon words, until you reduce 
Timothy to a Deacon ! Why not go a little farther and 
say, with the " evangelical Neander," that there is little evi- 



* Luke, xxii. 66. Acts, xxii. 5. 



t 2 Timothy, i. 6. 



THE TKUE ISSUE. 



429 



dence that St. Paul ever wrote this first Epistle to Timothy at 
all ? Or else take ground with the Rev. Edwin Hall, a recent 
assailant of the Church in Connecticut, who says very learn- 
edly, on the passage, " For this cause left I thee in Crete, that 
thou shouldest ordain elders in every city," that the word 
ordain " in the original has no possible reference to any cere- 
mony or mode of ordination," being the same word that is 
used in the passage, " By one man's disobedience many were 
made sinners:" whereupon the learned Sectarist exclaims, 
" There is no more reference to a mystic ceremony of ordina- 
tion in the case of Titus, than there is of a mystic ordination 
to make men sinners."* So Mr. Hall would revive the 
Levitical priesthood in the Church: for if men must be 
" made ministers" precisely as they are " made sinners" I see 
no other way than, as it was among the Jews, by genealogical 
descent. Gentlemen, go on ! All this harms not the Church. 

Nor did I overlook the passagef alleged by Dr. Miller as 
a notable record of a Presbyterian ordination : " When they 
had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them (on 
Barnabas and St. Paul,) they sent them away." Now mark 
the learned Doctor ! " This" says he, " is the most ample 
account of an ordination to be found in the Scripture; and 
it is an account which, if there were no other, would be 
sufficient to decide the present controversy in our favor." 
I accept the challenge. In that very passage, Barna- 
bas and Paul are said, before this "ordination," to be 
" prophets and teachers" already, "ministering to the Lord :" 
so that if Paul and Barnabas were ordained a second time by 
the other three prophets, it must have^been to a higher office 
than that of either "prophet or teacher." And the argument, 
in the mouth of a Presbyterian, is suicidal : for it makes Paul 
and Barnabas to be Apostles, ordained as such by the hands 

* See Chapin's excellent reply, " Puritanism not Protestantism." + Acts, xiii. 



430 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



of men acting under the express instruction of " the Spirit f 
and these Presbyterian " prophets" are commanded by revela- 
tion to add two more to the number of the Twelve ! A fine 
day's work for Presbyterians ! Those " primitive Presbyteri- 
ans" seem to have discovered very early that the Church re- 
quired more than Twelve Apostles ! We have no objection to 
this view. But the truth is, the context declares they were call- 
ed to a specific " work," which they " fulfilled" and " returned 
to Antioch, from whence they had been (not ordained, but) 
commended to the grace of God for the work which they 
fulfilled" Moreover, St. Paul had been an Apostle eight or 
ten years before this transaction at Antioch, and expressly 
and solemnly reiterates, that he was an Apostle, " not of man 
nor by man," nor even did he go up " to them that were 
Apostles before him ;" so that if he was now " ordained," it 
was to something higher than the apostolic office which he 
held before. Let us beware, lest, in escaping from the three 
orders, we may run into a fourth ; and make ""Peter and 
Paul," for the circumcision and the uncircumcision, the found- 
ers of the Papacy ! Really, we think that Dr. Miller's 
" ordaining" St. Paul after he had been ten years an Apostle, 
entitles him to rank with Mr. Hall, who would have Bishops 
" made" as men are " made sinners !" If it had been true, 
that Paul and Barnabas were, by this transaction, ordained 
to the Apostleship, we should have no reason in the world 
for disputing it : for the parties concerned were " prophets," 
and, by usage since the days of Adam, "prophets" could, 
under inspiration evidenced by suitable signs, make and un- 
make Priests, Kings, and Empires ; and even an infant-pro- 
phet, like Samuel, could pour upon the hoary head of a 
High Priest, a blessing or a curse. Do let " the prophets" 
at Antioch send the two Apostles forth on a short mission 
with their blessing, without making it out " the most ample 
account of an ordination to be found in Scripture /" 



CHAPTER XXIII. 



NUMBER FOUR; OR, PRE SB YT E RI ANISM 
AMONG- THE FATHERS. 

"What was there to oppose this array of Scripture ? The 
Fathers of the Church % Who can tell % We know the rest- 
lessness of human nature. Scarcely were the thunders or 
the trumpet on the mountain hushed, when Korah and the 
Levites of the lower order said to the Prelate-Priests : " Ye 
take too much upon you, ye sons of Aaron, seeing all the 
congregation are holy, and the Lord is among them !" Nor 
would it have been strange, if the severity of discipline under 
which the Bishops held the church and clergy in early ages, 
and to which modern times furnish no approximation, should 
have caused the like murmurings of discontent. But no. 
For three hundred years of piety and miracle and discipline, 
there was not a voice raised, within or without the church, 
against the Episcopacy. Aerius — " the madman," as he was 
called in his own times — was the first to assail it, under the 
specious, but till then unheard-of, play upon the words " Pres- 
byter" and " Bishop ;" a ruse which Theodoret instantly met, 
by reminding the faithful that those Who, in humility, were 
now called Bishops, had been in earlier ages called Apostles. 
Nor is it strange that the man who denied the Divinity of 
the Master, should have sought to cast the Master's servants 
out of the vineyard. No, Gentlemen, no ; you cannot father 
your new faith upon Jerome ! Aerius, of the band of Arius 



432 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



who betrayed the Master, is, in respect of the Episcopacy, 
the father of you all ! 

I left Princeton, as sure that at least Augustine, and Hilary, 
and Jerome, and Cyprian, were Presbyterians at heart, as 
that Dr. Miller was. And if they were not, it certainly was 
not the Doctor's fault, who did his very best, by every ex 
post facto art, to make them so. It mattered not that these 
men lived four and five hundred years after Paul and Peter 
and John. They were men of learning • and, what was more, 
they were Fathers ; and with me, as with Mr. Hall, a Father 
was a Father, without regard to his age. As soon therefore, 
as I could, I furnished myself with the best Benedictine 
editions of these Fathers ; that, under the far-reaching shad- 
ow of my Presbyterian vine, I might regale myself, in the 
years to come, on their record of its planting by apostolic 
hands. Accordingly I read these Fathers, and — O ye stars 
and light ! finding them Episcopalians, whither should I fly ? 
Sermons upon sermons, commentaries on commentaries, Epis- 
tles on Epistles, heaps upon heaps : — will there be no end, 
said i, to this testimony for Episcopacy 1 Not more sur- 
prised could I have been if Cyprian and Augustine, mitred 
and crosiered, and Jerome with cowl and scowl, had stood in 
their winding-sheets before me, to protest, one and all, against 
the slur for now two hundred years attempted to be cast 
upon their memories. 

But what did these men mean, say the pupils of Dr. Miller, 
by those famous passages against Episcopacy, so indelibly 
impressed upon our memory? So the Socinian inquires, 
What did inspired men mean, by representing our Lord as 
not knowing the judgment day 1 What did Paul mean by 
saying, " I have no commandment of the Lord, yet I give my 
judgment ;" " I suppose, therefore ;" " I speak by permission, 
not by commandment ;" " the rest speak I, not the Lord 
" I think also that I have the Spirit of God V Just as the 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 433 



infidel pounces upon certain passages, and separates them 
from the rest of Scripture ; or as the " Little-children Bap- 
tists," or "Mormons," or " Glory- Alleluia Brethren," or 
" Universalists," or "Perfectionists," or " Live-for-evers," or 
" Predestinationists," fasten on certain texts, isolating them 
from the whole tenor and drift and spirit of Scripture : so 
Blondel, and Mason, and Miller, and Potts, seize upon the 
word Presbytery or the word Bishop, in writings inspired ; 
and, in writings uninspired, fasten upon certain passages, 
which, if they prove any thing Presbyterianish, prove that 
some of the Fathers entirely forgot, at times, that they had 
written quartos and folios teeming with the opposite doctrine ! 
Even the humble writer of these pages would feel it an in- 
jury done to his memory, if hereafter, in order to make it 
seem that the Churchmen of this day held the Episcopacy in 
little esteem or reverence, it should be alleged that, in a 
chapter on Catholicity, he alluded (but it was pain and grief 
to him) to sentinels at the gates who admired more, and de- 
fended with more zeal, the trappings of their office, than the 
treasures of the palace ; and that he avowed, if the Episco- 
pacy were all that separated him from the sects around, he 
would cry, with all the earnestness he could throw into a 
prayer : Perish Episcopacy*! And so I would ; for, without 
judging another man's servant, in me the absurdity would be 
exceeded only by the wickedness of pretending agreement 
with the sects around me in " all that was evangelical and 
essential," and yet withholding the hand of fellowship because 
they did not agree with me about the rank of the servants at 
the door ! If the treasures were safe without them, what 
should I care about the sentinels ? Yet this is the way in 
which the memories of these Fathers have suffered. Read 
their writings for yourself, and do not rely even on an earnest 
" Perish Episcopacy''"' hunted up out of ten or twenty volumes, 
with " a hound's scent, that can smell further than it can see." 

37 



434 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



A man who can say, with Dr. Miller, of the transaction at 
Antioch, that it is " the most ample account of an ordination 
to be found in Scripture," when St. Paul had "been an Apos- 
tle many years before, and over and over denies that he was 
made an Apostle by the hands of men ; — this, moreover, to 
students and Christians who have the Bible in their hands : 
such a man is certainly quite competent to the task of met- 
amorphosing Jerome, Augustine, Hilary,- and Cyprian, or 
even Irenseus and Ignatius, into Presbyterians ; at least to the 
satisfaction of students and people in whose hands the writings 
of these fathers never were, and never will be, seen. If they 
do these things in a green tree, what will be done in the dry 1 
Poor Augustine ! Little did he dream that a delicate tour 
de phrase in a private letter to Jerome would, after the lapse 
of a thousand years, be construed into a concession that a 
Bishop had no prerogative of right above a Presbyter ! The 
compliment runs thus : 

" Atque idenjidem rogo, ut me 
fid enter co-rrigas, ubi mihi hoc opus 
esse perspexeris. "Quanquam enim 
secundum honor um vocabula, quae 
jam Ecclesiae usus obtinuerit, Epis- 
copatus Presbyterio major sit, 
tamen in multis rebus Augustinus 
Hieronymo minor est ; licet etiam 
a minore quolibet non sit refugi- 
enda vel dedignanda correctio." 



* The word now (not jampridem, nor jamdiu, but jam) signifying that these 
titles were recent, is omitted by Dr. Miller. 

t In the Lecture Room at Princeton, the words here inserted, according to my 
notes, are " Yet it was not so in the Apostles' days !" 



"And indeed I beg that you 
would from time to time correct 
me, when you see plainly that I 
need it. For although, according 
to the titles of honors which the 
usage of the Church has now* 
established, the Episcopate is 
greater than the Presbyteryf 
[here Dr. Snodgrass inserts the 
words, "not by authority of the 
Scriptures"] : yet in many respects 
Augustine is inferior to Jerome; 
though correction from any man- 
ner of inferior ought not to be 
avoided or disdained." 



PEESBYTEEIANISM AMONG THE FATHEES. 435 



Now what were the high-sounding " titles of honors" thus 
heaped upon the Bishops in the times of Augustine 1 Let 
us turn to the passage, and we shall find the following ex- 
planation. Augustine had written to Jerome a friendly re- 
monstrance, respecting some interpretations upon holy Scrip- 
ture from the pen of that learned Presbyter ; and, through 
the carelessness or malice of the hearer, the letters were 
seen in Italy, and their contents divulged to the injury of 
Jerome. Whereupon Jerome wrote a characteristic letter to 
the Bishop ; at which the poor Bishop, who was both as in- 
nocent and ignorant of the affront as a child unborn, was 
exceedingly perplexed. A second letter came. A third. 
Shorter and sweeter the missives grew, as time went on, and 
the amende honorable was not forthcoming from the bewildered 
Bishop. But Jerome covers up the bitterness of his indigna- 
tion with the honeyed words, " your Holiness," " your Bless- 
edness," "most happy Pope," or "Father," and the like. 
Meantime the solution of the mystery reaches Augustine : — 
the bearer of his letter had blazoned it by the way, in Italy. 
And now he writes to Jerome an explanation, in the most 
soothing terms he can employ. But, forasmuch as he cannot 
reciprocate the honorary " titles" by which the usage of the 
Church had " of late" distinguished the Bishop above the 
Presbyter : yet, very naturally and very sensibly and very 
delicately too, he compliments the Presbyter to whom he 
was writing, as being in many things superior to himself. 
And pray what does all this prove % That a Bishop was no 
better than a iPresbyter 1 Nay, it proves only that Augus- 
tine was a gentleman; and so endowed with no mean quali- 
fication for his office. Yet this is all, so far as I can hear, 
that the sectarists of the last three hundred years have been 
able to extract from sixteen huge folio volumes of a Father 
who, speaking of Aerius, who was the first to reject the Epis- 
copacy, says : 



436 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



" Aeriani ab Aerio quodam sunt, 
qui, cum esset Presbyter, diluisse 
fertur quod Episcopus non potuit 
ordinari; et in Arianorum haere- 
sim lapsus, propria quoque addi- 
disse dogmata* nonnulla, dicens — 
Presbyterum ab Episcopo nulla 
differentia debere discerni." 



" The Aerians are from one Aeriu3, 
who, when a Presbyter, is related 
to have taken it hard that he could 
not be ordained a Bishop ; and, 
falling into the Arian heresy, is 
reported to have added also some 
dogmas* of his own, saying that a 
Presbyter ought not to be account- 
ed in any respect different from a 
Bishop." 



And poor Chrysostom ! I have thy pardon, too, to crave, 
for having believed that, through the two-leaved gates of thy 
golden mouth, there came forth once a word to betray the 
unity of the Episcopacy, into the hands of a schism yet fu- 
ture by twelve hundred years. I was told by one whom I 
believed, and who received it by oral tradition, I suppose, 
that thou hadst said, about the year of Grace 400, that " They 
(the Bishops) have gained the ascendency over the Presby- 
ters only in ordination, and in this they have defrauded them." 
But thy words had fortunately been written down ; and, on 
looking at them for myself, I found that thou hadst never 
uttered such a thought, neither came it into thy mind. Thy 
words were, " In the laying on of hands alone have the Bis&ops 
been above the Presbyters, and in this only do they seem to 
have the pre-eminence :" — yap ^siporovi'a /xov>j i3#sp/3s/3^xafl'i, 
xaj toutw fxovov Soxovtfi irXsovsxrsTv rots rfpstifivripoig. And this 
is the very essence and quintessence of our claim : that the 
laying on of hands (for the word ^sjporovia includes more than 
ordination) is the grand prerogative lodged with the Bishops. 
Yet this is all that art and learning have been able, these 
three hundred years, to rake up for Presbytery, out of ten 
ponderous tomes of the great Bishop and orator of Con- 
stantinople. But though we have done with the testimony, 

* Epiphanius, of the same age, calls this dogma of Aerius, Dogma furiosum et 
stolidwm — a wild and crazy dogma. 



PKESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 437 



yet it may amuse the reader to 
passage from the same pen. 

DR. MILLER'S PRINTED LETTERS ON 
THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY, 1807. 

" In ordination alone, they (the 
Bishops) have gone beyond the 
Presbyters." [Nothing said about 
the original.] 



see two translations of this 



LECTURE ROOM VERSION, PRINCETON, 
JAN. 1, 1831. 

" They (the Bishops) have gained 
the ascendency over the Presby- 
ters only in ordination, and in this 
they have defrauded them — de- 
frauded, n\£ovacniv — the same word 
used in the Bible, Let no man 
defraud his brother." 



Eeally, here is an exegesis worthy of Mr. Hall, the dis- 
coverer that the word used for ordaining Bishops is the very 
same word used for making men sinners. And both are ad- • 
iiiirably on a par with the exegesis of the grave Divine who 
says, that all Paul meant by saying to Timothy, " Lay hands 
suddenly on no man," was to caution him never to strike a 
man in a passion: proving his interpretation in the usual 
way, too, by " comparing Scripture with Scripture ;" for it is 
written in the same Epistle, and also in the Epistle to Titus, 
that a Bishop must be u no striker I" Quoderat demonstran- 
dum. 

Surely, had Chrysostom been a Presbyterian, we should 
have had some glimpse of it in his commentary on the ex- 
pression, " with the laying on of the hands of the Presbytery :" 
but there he says, " The Apostle here speaks, not of Presby- 
ters, but of Bishops ; for Presbyters did not ordain a Bishop." 
Chrysostom, by the by, to recall the subject of the last chap- 
ter, is one who styles Timothy " The Apostle and Bishop of 
Ephesus ;" and speaks of Ignatius as succeeding St. Peter in 
Antioch, and as being " worthy of so large a principality ; 
for how great must we suppose his virtue and wisdom to 
have been, to be intrusted with the rule of so renowned a » 
city, and the government of a people numbering two hundred 

37* 



438 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCfi. 



thousand men!" Also, upon the passage,* "With the 
Bishops and Deacons," Chrysostom asks, "How is this? 
Were there many Bishops in one city ! By no means. But 
he calls the Presbyters by this name." So that if this re- 
nowned Bishop was a Presbyterian, all the Episcopalians of 
the nineteenth century are Presbyterians : for they believe 
with Chrysostom that Bishop and Presbyter designated the 
pastoral function, during the period that " Apostle" designated 
Episcopal. 

Poor Theodoret, too, about a. d. 440, in a commentary 
on 1 Tim. iii. 1, had said, " The Apostles call a Presbyter a 
Bishop, as we showed when we expounded the Epistle to the 

Philippians For, as I said, of old they called the 

same men both Bishops and Presbyters." Another hint, say 
you, of Presby terianism 1 Wait one moment. He says we 
must turn to his commentary on the Philippians, which runs 
thus : " Epaphroditus was the Apostle of the Philippians, 
because he was intrusted with the Episcopal government, 

under the appellation of Apostle, that those who, 

although in the order of Presbyters, were called Bishops 
in the beginning, should be subject to him." But this refer- 
ence is unnecessary. Dr. Miller chose to end his quotation 
with the words, " Of old they called the same men both 
Bishops and Presbyters." What could be more conclusive? 
But, Sirs, not quite so fast. I will not trouble you to turn 
to the commentary on Philippians to which Theodoret refers 
you : I only ask you to read six lines further on in the very 
passage Dr. Miller has undertaken to quote. Theodoret 
indeed does say, " Of old they called the same men both 
Bishops and Presbyters :" but, only six lines further on, he 
adds : " For those, as I have said, whom we now call Bishops, 
were in old times called Apostles ; but, in process of time, 
the name of Apostle was left to those who were in the strict 
* Philip, i. l. 



PEESBYTERIANISM AMONG- THE FATHERS. 439 



sense Apostles, [sent personally by the Saviour,] and the 
name of Bishop was restrained to those who were anciently 
called Apostles ; thus was Epaphroditus the Apostle of the 
Philippians, Titus of the Cretans, and Timothy the Apostle 
of the Asiatics." Yet this passage, only six lines further on 
in the very same paragraph, as also the one to which Theo- 
doret so expressly refers the student to prevent any miscon- 
ception of his meaning, are kept by Dr. Miller both out of 
his " Letters" and out of his " Lectures !" Is it any wonder 
that the students of Princeton make zealous Presbyterians ? 
How could it be otherwise % 

And poor Hilary, to you also must I make apology, for 
imputing to you, in my Calvinistic days, a sin that was cer- 
tainly not yours. It may have been good Calvinism in me 
to do so, but I am ready to acknowledge that it was not fair 
play. You said (or so I heard) that " In Egypt, even to this 
day, in the Bishop's absence the Presbyters ordain." Who 
can wonder that I was a Presbyterian, when so conclusive a 
testimony, escaping the vigilance of monks and mitres for 
a thousand years, now burst its cloistered sepulchre to bear 
witness to the truth 1 But did Hilary say it 1 What did he 
say % He said exactly this :* 

" Denique, apud Egyptum, Pres- " Finally, in Egypt, the Presby- 
byteri consignant, si praesens non ters sign or seal, if the Bishop be 
sit Episcopus." not present." 

Every body knows that ordino is the Latin word to express 
the act of ordination. Its use for this purpose is universal. 
On the contrary, it is doubted whether the word consigno 
was ever employed, in any single instance since the world 
began, to express the act of ordination. Moreover, we be- 
lieve that for two centuries sectarians have been looking for 
a passage in antiquity where this word has such a meaning, 

* Hilary, the Deacon, as the learned are generally agreed : not Hilary, the Bishop. 



440 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



and, so far as I remember, they are not yet able to produce 
it. Besides, is ordination so trifling a matter, that it is not 
worth while to wait till the Bishop could be " present V 
And are we to believe that Hilary could have supposed that 
Presbyters in his day ordained in Egypt, when he must have 
known that, even prior to the Council of Nice, a Council in 
Alexandria itself had formally pronounced the ordinations 
of one Colythus to be no ordinations, and his Presbyters to 
be no Presbyters, because it was discovered that Colythus 
was but a Presbyter himself, having never received due 
Episcopal consecration % — for the Council are careful to ex- 
plain that they do not depose these men as Presbyters, on 
the ground of schism; but merely make it known to the 
Churches that, Colythus being only a pretended Bishop, the 
persons he pretended to ordain were neither now, nor ever 
had been, Presbyters. What was it then that the Presbyters 
of Egypt did, in the absence of the Bishop ? Perhaps they 
absolved returning penitents, an office usually allowed to the 
Bishops. Perhaps even Cyprian, in his exile, had allowed 
them to do so at Carthage. Perhaps they gave tickets of re- 
admission, under the Bishop's name and seal, to those who had 
lapsed in time of persecution. Perhaps in the Bishop's Cathe- 
dral, or Basilica, they gave the solemn benediction in the 
Bishop's place. Or, I am willing to admit that, possibly, in 
the Bishop's absence, the Presbyters confirmed, for it may pos- 
sibly be that the Church in Egypt fell, in this respect, into a 
usage of the present Church of Rome, practised in our own day, 
in Porto Rico and elsewhere, where political motives have, at 
times, prevented the residence of a Bishop. But, let con- 
signant mean what it may, we are yet to see the first passage 
in antiquity where it signifies to ordain. We are strongly 
of opinion that it has reference to "trifles light as air." The 
passage (too long to quote) is a commentary on Ephesians, 
iv. 11. "He gave some, Apostles; and some, Prophets; 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG- THE FATHERS. 441 



and some, Evangelists ; and some, Pastors and Teachers, 
&c." " The Apostles," he says, " are the Bishops — Apostoli 
sunt Episcopi ; the Prophets, expounders of Scripture ; the 
Evangelists are the Deacons, &c. Eor in the Bishop are 
contained all the other orders : because he is the first priest, 
that is, he is the Chief, or Prince of the Priests;* and he is 
also the Chief Prophet, and Evangelist, &c."* Why does 
Dr. Miller omit this from the beginning of the passage he 
pretends to quote ? Hilary goes on to say that " after 
churches were established, things were settled otherwise than 
at the beginning, for the sake of order." Why not tell us, 
Doctor, what these awful innovations are 1 Hilary tells us 
thus : Philip did not demand a long probation of the Eunuch, 
or interpose a period of fasting; but baptised him on the 
spot : the Church now requires a probation and a fast. Paul 
and Silas did not require time, in the baptism of the jailor : 
the Church at the present time requires a delay. Peter had 
no deacon to assist in baptising Cornelius- and his house, for 
as yet the deacons were but seven. " And here it is," adds 
Hilary — but we cannot consent to go on further with Dr. 
Miller's version only ; we place our own more literal trans- 
lation by its side. 

His.f otms.f 
" And here it is that the Apos- And hence it is that the wri- 
tle's writings do not in all things tings of the Apostle do not in all 

* "Nam in Episcopo omnes ordines sunt, quia Primus Sacerdos, hoc est, Prin- 
ceps est sacerdotum, et Propheta, et Evangelista, et cagtera." 

f "Ideo non per omnia conveniunt scripta apostoli ordinationi quae nunc in Ec- 
clesia est ; quia haec inter ipsa primordia sunt scripta. Nam et Timotheum Pres- 
byterum a se creatum Episcopum vocat, quia Primi Presbyteri Episcopi appella- 
bantur, ut recedente eo sequens ei succederet. Denique apud jEgyptum Pres- 
byteri consignant, si prsesens non sit Episcopus. Sed quia coeperunt sequentes 
Presbyteri indigni inveniri ad Primatus tenendos, immutata est ratio, prospiciente 
concilio ut non ordo, sed meritum crearet Episcopum constitution multorum 
sacerdotum judicio, ne indignus temere usurparet, et esset multis scandalum." It 
•will be observed that the sentence about Egypt abruptly breaks the progress of 
the passage, and the unity of the writer's idea respecting the succession to the 
Episcopate, of the Presbyter next in order. Besides, it is nearly the identical 



442 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



agree to the present constitution 
of the Church; because they are 
written under the first rise of the 
Church — for he calls Timothy, who 
was created a Presbyter by him, a 
Bishop, for so at first the Presby- 
ters were called;* among whom 
this was the course of governing 
the Churches, that as one withdrew, 
another took his place; and in 
Egypt, even at this day, the Pres- 
byters ordain in the Bishop's ab- 
sence. But because the following 
Presbyters began to be found un- 
worthy to hold the first place, the 
method was changed, the Council 
providing that not order, but 
merit, should create a Bishop." 



things agree to the present order 
of the Church ; because they were 
written amidst the very beginnings 
of the Church. For he calls Tim- 
othy, who was created a Presbyter 
by him, a Bishop, (for the First 
Presbyters were called Bishops;) 
so that, on his departure, the one 
following [or the next in order] 
should succeed him. Finally, in 
Egypt, [the words " even at this 
day" are an interpolation by the 
Doctor] the Presbyters sign, [or 
seal, or absolve from censure, or 
confirm, if you please ; but it no- 
where means ordain,] if the Bish- 
op be not present. But because 
the Presbyters next following [or 
next in order] began to be found 
unworthy to hold the Primacies, 
(Primatus,) the method was chan- 
ged, the Council providing that not 
order but merit should make a 
Bishop, who should be appointed 
by the judgment of many priests, 
lest one unworthy should rashly 
usurp the office, and become a 
scandal to many. 

Now what does all this amount to ? Simply, that the 
Egyptians had changed the old-fashioned way of obtaining a 
successor to the Episcopate. In old times, he says, the 

passage in a fragment once attributed falsely to Augustine : "Nam in Alexandria 
et per totum iEgyptuin, si desit Episcopus, consecrat Presbyter." Whether Hilary 
be the author of this fragment or not, Presbyterians could make no use of it, and 
indeed, I believe, do not adduce it: for, supposing it had a reference to ordination, 
it says consecrat Presbyter, not consecrant Presbyteri. 

* So Dr. Miller renders it ; or, more literally, " for so the first (primi) Presby- 
ters were called." This, then, was another, of the innovations, that those who 
were once called Apostles, now went by the unassuming name of Bishops, by 
which even Presbyters were called at first. 



PEESBYTERIANISM AMONG- THE FATHERS. 443 



Presbyter next in seniority (of age or orders) succeeded to 
the primacy : but because the next in order was often unfit, 
a council decreed it should be determined by election. Now 
to all this add : " Finally — Denique, (an important word, 
overlooked by Dr. Miller,) in Egypt, the Presbyters (if you 
please) confirm if the Bishop is not present," and it makes 
another of the innovations practised by the Church in Egypt ! 
Here is the list of these innovations : 1. The candidate for 
baptism must submit to a probation ; 2. He must perform 
an alloted fast ; 3. A Priest has now-a-days a deacon to assist 
him at baptism ; 4. A Bishop is no longer called by his 
ancient title of Apostle ; 5. Nor a Presbyter called Bishop 
as of old ; 6. The next oldest Presbyter does not succeed to 
I the Episcopate, as he did formerly in Egypt ; 7. A Layman 
is not now permitted to baptise ; 8. Deacons no longer 
preach ; 9. Finally, {denique — to conclude, in fine, finally, 
lastly — say the lexicons,) in Egypt, if the Bishop be absent, 
the Presbyters bless, absolve, consecrate the Chrism, confirm 
— no matter what — it is the denique, the last and worst of the 
; innovations ! But even in Egypt — land of the old magi- 
. cians, land of Jannes and Jambres — they never dreamed that 
. Presbyters could make a Bishop. Dr. Miller leaves out the 
j word finally, and inserts, " even at the present day." We 
have seen Dr. Miller's omission too of the commencement of 
this passage, that Bishops are the Apostles. But among 
Hilary's alleged innovations, Dr. Miller takes care not to 
notice another,^viz. : that in his days the Deacons did not 
preach; although he had before quoted the fact that as 
" Bishops were Apostles," so Deacons were and ought to be 
Evangelists or preachers ! Certainly if Presbyterians, who 
i stop the mouths of their Deacons, are satisfied with the pas- 
sage they have found, we, for our part, are quite delighted. 
In St. Paul's days, " Bishops were called Apostles," and in 
the days of St. Peter, " Deacons preached I" 



444 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



But you have only had the Doctor's translation : now take 
his comment. I ask the candid reader to judge between the 
comment and the fact. 



COMMENT. 

" In this passage .... Hilary 
declares that Presbyters, even then, 
sometimes ordained ; and that the 
reason of their not continuing to 
exercise this power was, that many 
of them being unfit to be trusted 
with such a power, it was taken 
out of their hands, as a prudential 
measure, by the authority of the 
Church." 



FACT. 

In this passage Hilary says not 
one word about Presbyters ordain- 
ing; and declares that their con- 
firming (if it was so much) in the 
Bishop's absence, was an innova- 
tion. He thinks, too, that the rea- 
son why the next Presbyter in 
order did not now succeed to the 
Primacy was, that thus unfit men 
sometimes obtained the " Prima- 
cies:" which indicated the expe- 
diency of resorting, in case of 
vacancy, to an election. 

The Princeton " Professor of Church History and Govern- 
ment," adduces also Hilary's commentary on 1 Tim. iii. 8, 
which we will compare with Hilary himself. 



DOCTOR MILLER. 

"Hilary affirms — 'The ordina- 
tion of Bishop, and ordination of 
Bishop and Presbyter, is one and 
the same.' Could he possibly have 
said this, if they had been different 
orders, and had received a differ- 
ent ordination ?" 



"After the Bishop, the Apostle 
proceeds to the ordination of Dea- 
cons. Why ? Because the ordi- 
nation of Bishops and Presbyters 
is one ; for each is a Priest. Every 
Bishop is a Presbyter, though every 
Presbyter is,not a Bishop ; nor xoas 
it lawful or .avowed — neque enim 
fas erat aut licebat — that an in- 
ferior should ordain a superior; 
for no one can give what he has not 
received." 



Fain would I here take leave of Hilary. But Dr. Miller, 
in his last book of 1835, prepared expressly as a permanent 
work for the Presbyterian Tract and Sunday School Society, 



PEESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 445 



says, on page 57 : " Ambrose, in the fourth century, in his 
commentary on the Ephesians, expressly declares that, in his 
day, the Deacons ordinarily were not authorized to preach." 
Now, who would suspect, Dr. Miller, that this quotation is 
from the commentary of Hilary, and from the very passage 
in that commentary* which we were but now considering % 
Then you rightly called the writer Hilary, now you call 
him Ambrose! This, however, we may forgive ; it has 
not misled us.f But how shall we forgive your adducing 
this passage as a proof that the Deacons were not generally 
authorized to preach until after the days of Hilary : when 
Hilary declares, that their - not being allowed to preach 
then, was* an encroachment on their rights, and one of the nine 
or ten innovations he speaks of in the Church, alleging, out 
of Scripture, that Philip the Deacon was a preacher, and that 
" Deacons were Evangelists /" Can we wonder that Prince- 
ton has made Presbyterians % Or that Presbyterians have 
made dumb Deacons % 

Very queer quotations these of the Doctor's ! But no mat- 
ter : Hilary must serve them one more good turn before 
they can let him go. ■ They have done their best to make 
him out an enemy to the Bishops ; why not also prove him 
to be a friend to ruling Elders 1 Here is the proof! " Where- 
fore," says Hilary, on 1 Tim. v. 1, " both the Synagogue, and 
afterwards the Church, had Elders, without whose counsel 
nothing was done in the Church ; which order, by what negli- 
gence it grew into disuse, I know not, unless perhaps by the 
sloth, or rather the pride of the teachers, while they alone 
wished to appear something." This passage made on me 

* Ephes. iv. 2. 

f That these commentaries were attributed to Ambrose falsely, has been estab- 
lished within 300 years, Erasmus leading the way ; and they are now commonly cred- 
ited to Hilary, the Deacon. How does Mr. Miller quote them as from Ambrose in 
his last book, when in a former one he was correct ? Is he going backward in 
his learning ? 

38 



446 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



a strong impression. "Synagogue!" "Elders!" " Which 
order!" "Grown into disuse!" For years I believed 
the tradition. At length I turned to the passage, and, 
as usual, found that the clew to its meaning had been 
omitted in the quotation. It is on the injunction to Tim- 
othy, to treat " old men as fathers, young men as brothers, 
the elder women as mothers, the younger as sisters." It 
begins : " Apud omnes gentes utique honorabilis est senec- 
tus," &c. "Among all nations old age is held in honor. 
Whence the Synagogue, and afterwards the Church, had its 
old men, (not Elders, not Presbyters, but elderly persons, 
seniors,) whom it was usual to consult. Which — not " which 
order" as Dr. Miller renders it, but — which custom of talcing 
advice from the aged had been laid aside." A sort of church- 
wardens, perhaps, of whom even still one is commonly that 
highly respectable individual, "the oldest inhabitant," at that 
time dispensed with ! Or, it may have been a council of ad- . 
vice, both of laymen and Presbyters : a council which all the 
Bishops of the Church in this country enjoy, and which is 
often composed of the aged and wise. But the idea of turn- 
ing these old gentlemen into "Elders" and calling them an 
" order," ..is really laughable. 

These may suffice as examples of the strange things which 
I formerly credited, on traditions handed clown from Salma- 
sius and Blondel to the present race of Presbyterians. Indeed, 
I once believed of the world-renowned Irenseus, born twenty- 
five years before the death of St. John, and Bishop of Lyons, 
that "while he held this station," (so says Dr. Miller,) "he 
was the bearer of a letter from ' the Presbytery of Lyons to 
Eieutherius the Bishop of Rome,' in which the Presbyters 
call him their brother and colleague /" The Doctor says that 
Irenseus took the letter, when he was sent " on some special 
ecclesiastical business to Rome." But what was this " spe- 
cial business V ' Let us see. A frightful persecution rages at 



PKESBYTEMANISM AMONG THE FATHEES. 447 



Lyons. The blood of the martyrs dyes the streets. Pothinus, 
their Bishop, has just received the crown of martyrdom, at 
the age of ninety. His Presbyters, as was done in the case of 
Ignatius and of Polycarp, instantly send news of it to Asia 
and Phrygia ; and by Irenseus, their " brother and colleague," 
to Eome. It was not until the Church at Lyons could take 
breath, that this disciple of Polycarp, who was in turn the' 
disciple of St. John, was, after his return from Rome, or- 
dained the successor of Pothinus ! When will our Presby- 
terian Divines learn to be accurate ? So, likewise, I believed 
on a modern tradition, (for the traditions of Presbyterianism, 
like those of Popery, are extremely modern,) that Cyprian, 
the renowned Bishop of Carthage, had called a very worthy 
man named Numidicus, " a ruling Elder" and had promised 
to. promote him to the office of "teaching Presbyter." But 
I the words of Cyprian are, " Promovebitur quidem, cum Deus 
permiserit, ad ampliorem locum suae religionis" — not to a 
, higher, hut a wider place, or field, or sphere. And, to prove 
that this is so, Cyprian in this very Epistle declares that he 
is commanded by revelation to add " the Presbyter Numidi- 
1 cus to the roll of the Presbyters of Carthage ; that our num- 
bers, which the lapse of some Presbyters hath lessened, may 
be replenished with such glorious priests — gloriosis Sacerdoti- 
\ bus." So my ruling Elder turned out to be a glorious Priest ! 
\ And a right glorious Priest he was ! Eor, while the Presby- 
f ters of the city were cowering before the executioner, and 
| their ranks were thinning out, partly by martyrdom, but 
! more Jby apostasy : he, an obscure and humble country-Pres- 
| byter, came to the notice of his Bishop, as one who, by his 
exhortations, had sustained numbers of martyrs while they 
were burned or stoned to death ; and had seen, unshaken, his 
own wife committed to the flames; and who, after being 
roasted and stoned himself, was left for dead, when his daugh- 
ter discovered Mm under a pile, of stones, and, by her courage 



448 



LOOKING FOR THE CHUECH. 



and her skill, brought him back to life. No wonder Cyprian 
desired such piety to shine in a " wider sphere !" Nor is it, 
at the same time, wonderful that the young men at Princeton 
believe in ruling Elders t* • 

This is about as far as I ever went in believing the strange 
things that are handed down at Princeton concerning the 
Fathers. I do not think I ever believed that the General 
Council of about two hundred Bishops which condemned the 
heresy of Nestorius, numbered " six thousand Bishops ;" or 
(the fact so well authenticated, says Dr. Miller) that St. Pat- 
rick, a Bishop sent under the auspices of the Pope of Rome 
to Ireland, ordained " three hundred and sixty-five Bishops or 
pastors, and " three thousand ruling Elders ;" or that a single 
metropolitan had " six thousand Bishops" under him ; or, that 
" the Bishop of Antioch, or Rome, or Carthage, even until the 
fourth century, was the pastor of a single congregation," al- 
though I did not then. know that, at the end of the third cen- 
tury, Dioclesian destroyed forty Churches in the city of Rome ; 
and that Rome, in the middle of the same century, had forty- 
six Presbyters, fourteen Deacons, above fifteen hundred poor, 
supported from the offerings, and an innumerable multitude 
of people, that aided or sustained many other Churches in dif- 
ferent cities, even as far as Arabia and Syria. Nor did I 
know that in the " parish" of Constantinople there were at the 
same time sixty Presbyters ; and in the " parish" of Carthage a 
large number, for many of them cowered before the persecution, 
and Cyprian, himself afterwards a martyr, names eight that were 
yet celebrated in the list ; and, in the passage concerning Nu- 

* "Who, sir," says Dr. Bowden,in a colloquy with Dr. Miller, "informed you 
that there were ruling Elders in Carthage?" "Cyprian, Ep. 39." "Go on, sir, if 
you please:" "Cyprian, writing to his Presbyters, and Elders, and people," — " Stop 
here one moment ; that is not the address of the Epistle. It runs thus— ' Cyprian, 
to his Presbyters, and Deacons, and to all the people, his brethren, sendeth greet- 
ing.' You add Elders, which is not in the address. This is not quite fair. I am 
sorry you should have had recourse to it, but I will put it to the account of those 
things quas inuria fudit. Now, this being corrected, proceed." 



PEESBYTEEIANISM AMONG- THE FATHEES. 449 



midicus, he speaks of replenishing the " copiam, or abundance," 
of his Presbyters with such " illustrious priests," and says 
that the persecution was so terrific, that every day " thousands" 
of cards were issued by the confessors' and martyrs for the 
reconciliation , of those who had lapsed; and another writer 
says, that when the persecutor entered Carthage, about a. d. 
240, he found there Episcopum et maximam turbam clerico- 
rum — " the Bishop and a very great crowd of clergymen :" 
all in addition to the fact that we find recorded accidentally, 
not long afterwards, the very names of the Cathedral and 
seven of the principal churches. Bishops of a " single con- 
gregation," Gentlemen % Surely you cannot be in earnest! 
Still, I see that, in close quarters, it is the only shift you can 
make. " Six thousand Bishops in a province," when you wish 
to show that a Bishop had only a single congregation ; and, 
in the next breath, " but one congregation in all Constantino- 
ple, or Eome, or Carthage," when you have to show that each 
congregation had its Bishop ! What can be the origin of this 
fanciful idea ?* With Lord King, towards two centuries ago, 
it seems to have weighed considerably, that a Diocese was, in 
the language of the Fathers, called a parish — rfapoixicc. He 
seems not to have observed, until Sclater drew his attention 
to the fact, that the Greek word dioecesis (diocese) was ren- 
dered by the Latin parochia (parish) ; that J erome so renders 
it himself; that Augustine speaks of the town of Fussula, 
though forty miles distant from Hippo, as belonging to his 
"parish ;" and that even in later times the Venerable Bede 
says, " the province of the Southern Saxons belonged to the 

* Perhaps, as Sectarians are satisfied with their ordained ministers, without in- 
quiring who ordained the first that started out : so writer takes from the writer 
hefore him this story, without asking the question, " Where did it come from ?" 
As this particular tradition is traceable to Lord King, so nearly all their other ab- 
breviated quotations from the Fathers may be seen in King and Blondel. A quaint 
old writer, nearly two centuries ago, speaks of " Salmasius, who writ on this sub- 
ject before Blondel, and whose steps Blondel most-what treads in." 

38* 



450 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



parish of Winchester." All this trifling about " a single con- 
gregation" in the capital cities of the Roman Empire, as " the 
utmost result of all the labors of the blessed Apostles, and 
martyrs, and confessors, for three hundred years together," 
was nauseating even to my youthful stomach. Why, Sirs, 
you are shaking hands, as we have shown you is your wont, 
with the Jew and the Infidel, who have always insisted that 
the number of Christians was despicably small, and that 
Christianity was utterly powerless to make any impression on 
the masses, until the accidental conversion of Constantine 
threw into the scale the argument of the sword. But we ex- 
cuse you ! You have never read Tertullian, in the age suc- 
ceeding the Apostles, who declares to the Roman magistrates 
that, even then, the Christians were "nearly the majority in 
every city ;" that " though we are of yesterday, yet your 
cities, and islands, and forts, and tribes, and armies, and even 
senates, and courts, and palaces, are filled with us. Your 
temples only have we left you free. Should we go off from 
you to climes unknowiij you would be amazed at your desolar 
tion, and have more enemies than subjects left you." You have 
never read the accurate Eusebius, who tells you that in " all 
the cities and villages," at the close of the apostolic age, "there 
was the greatest multitude of thronged and crowded assem- 
blies, like heaped-up grain upon a barn-floor." But certainly 
you have read the account, in Scripture, of the vast numbers 
in the Church at Jerusalem, where " three thousand souls" 
were added " in one day" and the Lord yet " added to the 
Church daily such as should be saved ;" and yet again, " the 
number of the men was about five thousand," and " believers 
were the more added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and 
women," and " still the Word of God increased, and the num- 
ber of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly, and a 
great company of the priests were obedient to the faith." You 
say that James, the brother of the Lord, was one of the 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 451 



Twelve : think you that one of the Twelve, a brother of the 
Lord, would have remained for thirty years in Jerusalem to 
minister to " a single congregation V Nay, says St. James 
himself, twenty years afterward, " Thou seest, brother, how 
many thousands (in the original, how many myriads, or tens 
of thousands) of Jews there are which believe." But you had 
rather reiterate the slander of the Jew and the Infidel, that, 
after three centuries of fanatic toil, there was " but a single 
congregation in Alexandria, or Eome, or Carthage, or Con- 
stantinople," than give the Catholic Church her rightful ar- 
gument for the Episcopacy, from the multitude of her par- 
ishes. 

This, then, is your dilemma : if there was but a single con- 
gregation in Constantinople, why sixty Presbyters ? If there 
were sixty, or even thirty congregations, why the one Bishop ? 
A new idea strikes you ! He was the " Standing Moderator 
of the Presbytery." " Standing Moderator T "Yes!" Let 
us try how this "new reading" harmonizes with an historical 
fact. The " Moderator" of the Presbytery of Rome dies 
about the year 250. The event produces a marked sensation 
in the Churches, far and near; and, in due time, sixteen 
"Moderators," from the Presbyteries around, assemble in 
Rome to "make" a "Moderator" for the Presbytery of 
Rome ! " Why would not the forty-six Presbyters at Rome," 
asks Dr. Bowden, " have done the business V Really, bad 
as it is, I think you had better stick to your first hypothesis, 
even at the expense of an old and unanswerable argument for 
our holy religion — " That for three or four hundred years there 
was but one congregation even in Rome itself!" Crowd into it 
the forty-six Presbyters, and the fifteen hundred widows and 
poor supported by its alms, and the large offerings sent to the 
Churches of Phrygia and Asia : still it is a better story than 
the other. People do not read Eusebius, or Cyprian, or Ter- 
tullian. Students of theology do not look into the fathers. 



452 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



Only stick to it that, for three hundred years, there was but 
a single society of Christians in a city ; that the blood of the 
martyrs was not the seed of the Church, fertilizing its soil and 
multiplying its harvests, but that it fell on our altars, extin- 
guishing their fires ! Go on telling the story : a great many 
will continue to believe you. 

Irenseus, who was an infant in the latter days of St. J ohn, 
is another to whom I must make reparation. Let one quota- 
tion suffice,* since they are all of them of the same nature. 
" Obey those Presbyters who have the succession, as we have 
shown, from the Apostles, who, with the succession of the 
Episcopate, received the [undoubted] gift of truth according to 
the good pleasure of the Father." Here Dr. Miller stops. 
Irenseus proceeds : " But those who keep aloof from THE 
PRINCIPAL SUCCESSION, and have gatherings elsewhere, 
(quocunque loco,) hold ye in suspicion, as of evil report, or as 
heretics ; or schismatics, proud, self-pleasers ; or as hypo- 
crites, doing this for gain or vain-glory." Irenseus then com- 
pares them to Nadab and Abihu bringing strange fire to the 
altar ; to Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, " sundering and de- 
stroying the unity of the Church." We see now why the 
Doctor stopped where he did. But take even the words the 
Doctor quotes : Irenseus does not say, " Obey the Presby- 
ters" but " Obey those {his presbyteris) Presbyters who have 
the succession from the Apostles" in contradistinction to all 
and any others. Eor Irenseus, arguing in another placej; 
against Presbyters who taught strange doctrines, which they 
alleged had been confided to them secretly by the Apostles, 
declares that, " If the Apostles knew secret mysteries which 
they communicated to the perfect, separately and secretly 
from the rest, they would by all means have committed them 
to those to whom they committed the very Churches ; for 
they would have those irreprehensible and perfect, whom they 

* Lib. IV. cap. 23. t Lib. III. cap. 3. 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 453 



left as their successors, handing over to them their own very 
place of supremacy" (magisterii.) We remind you again, 
that Dr. Miller's quotation of this passage leaves out this 
sentence. Irenseus then goes on to say that Linus succeeded 
the Apostles at Rome, then Anicetus, then Clement, then ? 
Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, &c, to Eleuthe- 
rius, the twelfth in the Apostolic line. Then follows a simi- 
lar rebuke to Presbyters " who have gatherings elsewhere.'''' 
The whole thing then amounts to this : that those Presbyters 
pretended (as others do now) to have discovered some great 
secret hidden from mankind before, and derived directly from 
the inspired Apostles ; and Irenasus meets them with the an- 
swer, that such secrets, if any existed, must have been confided 
to those Presbyters to whom they delivered " the very Church- 
es," (ipsas ecclesias,) and "their own very place of authority" 
(suum ipsorum locum magisterii ;) such, says Irenasus, as was 
Linus, mentioned in the Epistle to Timothy, and Clement, 
who saw and conversed with the Apostles : delivering to 
them, not the Episcopacy that Presbyters held 'in common, 
but " the Episcopacy of administering the Church" (episcopa- 
tum administrandae ecclesige.) So then, Doctor, your Presby- 
ters holding gatherings elsewhere, are over and over exhorted 
to return to the unity and line of those Presbyters who re- 
ceived the succession from the Apostles, and with it their 
" very" and " own" place of " authority" Very good advice ! 
Will the gentlemen at Princeton take it ? 

If rest be sweet to the weary, I should rejoice here to rest. 
But there are two other ancient writers to whose memories 
my former imputations did an injustice", that must now be 
atoned for. One is at the beginning, the other at the end, of 
the period covered in this chapter. One is Ignatius; the 
other, Jerome. 

In the year of Grace 1835, Doctor Miller prepared, " by 
particular request," for " The Presbyterian Tract and Sunday 



454 LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



School Society," a third work, entitled, " Presbyterianism the 
truly Primitive and Apostolical Constitution of the Church 
in which, after quoting Theodoret only, and him but once, on 
the Episcopal side, and accompanying the quotation with the 
remark, "No one doubts that, in Theodoret's time, Prela- 
cy had obtained a complete establishment," he goes on to 
say: 

" It is yery certain that the Fathers who flourished nearest 
to the Apostolic age, generally represent Presbyters, and not 
Prelates, as the successors of the Apostles. Ignatius, in par- 
ticular, who was contemporary with the last of the Apostles, 
expresses himself again and again in the following language : 
'The Presbyters succeed in the place of the bench of the 
Apostles and again, ' In like manner, let all reverence the 
Presbyters as the Sanhedrim of God, and college of the Apos- 
tles and again, ' Be subject to your Presbyters as to the 
Apostles of Jesus Christ, our hope.' And once more, ' Fol- 
low the Presbyters as the Apostles.' Which shall we believe, 
Ignatius or Theodoret V 

Is it to be wondered at, that the students at Princeton are 
satisfied with Presbyterian ordination ? Do, young Gentle- 
men, allow your eyes to look farther than your ears hear, and 
be at the trouble for once to see what Ignatius did really 
say ! But let us first of all ascertain exactly when Ignatius 
lived : for you may be misled if you are not careful. One 
of your latest writers, the Eev. Edwin Hall, says of Ignatius 
that " he comes too late by a whole hundred years" to have 
any thing to say of the primitive church ! We send him, 
for correction, to Dr. Miller, who confesses that Ignatius 
" was contemporary with the last of the Apostles," having 
been, in fact, made Bishop of Antioch by them in the year 
70, and having thus exercised his Episcopate for about thirty 
years before the death of St. John. Now for the quota- 
tions ! 



PBESBYTERIANISM AMONG- THE FATHEES. 455 



THE IGNATIUS OF PRINCETON. 

1. "The Presbyters succeed in 
the place of the bench of the 
Apostles" — said to be declared by 
Ignatius " again and again." 

2. " In like manner, let all rever- 
ence the Presbyters as the Sanhe- 
drim of God, and college of the 
Apostles." 



3. " Be subject to your Presby- 
ters as to the Apostles of Jesus 
Christ our hope." 



4. "Follow the Presbyters as 
the Apostles." 



THE IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH. 

1. Ignatius never wrote such a 
passage in his life. Its author was 
a " venerable father" who flour- 
ished at Princeton toward the 
middle of the nineteenth century. 

2. " In like manner let all rever- 
ence the Deacons as Jesus Christ ; 
and the Bishop as the Father ; and 
the Presbyters as the Sanhedrim 
of God and college of the Apos- 
tles." (Ep. to Trail, sec. 3.) The 
words here italicized the Doctor 
did not see. 

3. " Do nothing without your 
Bishop, even as ye are wont ; also 
be subject to your Presbyters, as 
to the Apostles of Jesus Christ, 
our hope; in whom if we walk, 
we shall be found in Him. The 
Deacons also, as being the minis- 
ters of the mysteries of Jesus Christ, 
&cV (Ep. to Trail, sec. 2.) Again 
I have put in italics the words 
that escaped the Doctor's notice. 

4. " Follow your Bishop, as Je- 
sus Christ did the Father ; and 
the Presbytery, as the Apostles; 
and reverence the Deacons, as the 
command of God." (Ep. to Smyr- 
neans, sec. 8.) Poor Bishops and 
Deacons, still not noticed by the 
Doctor ! And if any person will 
show me "in Ignatius the passages 
that, Dr. Miller says, represent a 
Bishop as "the person by whom 
all marriages were celebrated" 
who was "to be personally ac- 
quainted with all his flock" or, " to 
take notice with his own eye of 



456 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



* those who were absent from public 

worship," I promise to commit 
. this work, as an atonement, to the 

flames, and to present to the Sem- 
inary at Princeton a complete and 
handsome series of the Fathers of 
the first ten centuries. 

Now, kind reader, I have a thing to show you that is 
somewhat odd. On page 53 of the same work, Ignatius is 
brought forward again, in the following passage : 

" With respect to the testimony of Ignatius, early in the 
second century, who is commonly regarded and resorted to 
as the sheet-anchor of the Episcopal claim, we could scarcely 
wish for a more distinct and graphic description of Presby- 
terianism than his Epistle represents as existing in all the 
Churches which he addressed. Ignatius speaks expressly of a 
Bishop, Elders, and Deacons existing in every worshipping 
assembly which he addressed. Is this the language of Prel- 
acy 1 So far from it, nothing can be plainer than that this 
language can be reconciled with the Presbyterian system 
alone. Presbyterians are the only denomination who have, 
in every worshipping assembly, a Bishop, Presbyters or El- 
ders, and Deacons." 

Now what are we to make of this ? In the former place, 
he quotes Ignatius as proving that the Presbyters or Pastors 
were the successors of the Apostles ; but now he says, " Pres- 
byterians are the only denomination who have in every 
worshipping assembly a Bishop, Elders, and Deacons." Well 
done ! On page 47, it is the Presbyters that succeed the 
Apostles : on page 53, the very same word, in the very same 
passages, is translated Elders ; and we have a Pastor with 
his Elders and Deacons "in every worshipping assembly."* 

* Ignatius, by the by, says not one word of ' : any worshipping assembly ;" his 
Epistles are to Churches : — one, for example, to the Church of Ephesus, a Church 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 457 



Certainly these Presbyters of Dr. Miller's remind one of the 
bats : when the cat comes, each of " the bench" of bats cries, 
"You mistake, sir, I am not a mouse;" and, when the hawk 
comes, " I am not a bird." This dexterous somerset with Igna- 
tius, our Princeton Divine has performed in another way, to 
which a venerated Bishop has already invited attention. 



THE DOCTOR S LETTERS ON THE 
MINISTRY. 

" That even the snorter Epistles 
of Ignatius are unworthy of confi- 
dence, as the genuine works of the 
Father whose name they bear, is 
the opinion of many of the ablest 
and best judges in the Protestant 
world." 



THE DOCTOR S LETTERS ON UNI- 
TARIANISM. 

" The great body of learned 
men consider the shorter Epistles 
of Ignatius as, in the main, the real 
works of the writer whose name 
they bear." 



There is a similar feature in the lecture delivered to the class 
at Princeton, January 5, 1831. 



FORMER PART OF THE LECTURE. 

"Says a zealous advocate for 
Prelacy, in the ' Christian Obser- 
ver,' the Epistles of Ignatius are 
so studied and contrived to prove 
the three orders, that we cannot 
receive one word of them without 
suspicion." 



LATTER PART OF THE LECTURE. 

" If principle would allow me, I 
should contend earnestly for their 
genuineness, because they speak 
most decidedly in Presbyterian 
language of the Bishop or Pastor, 
the bench of Elders, and the Dea- 



Really this is "hot and cold out of the same mouth." 
When Professor Stuart denied, in opposition to the Fathers, 
that the Son of God was " Begotten before all worlds," he 
remarked that "we may climb on the shoulders of the 
fathers and see farther than they did ;" to which Dr. Miller 
replied, that it is " not so easy for pygmies to climb upon 
the shoulders of giants." 



Yet, when it suits our Doctor, 



which, in St. Paul's time, had Presbyters that preached and " fed the Church of 
God." 

39 



458 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



" the fathers are not to be trusted." Poor Ignatius ! The 
manner of his martydom seems to have but foreshadowed 
the mercilessness with which he should again be mangled 
in the last days, and fragments be torn from him, and 
made a spectacle to angels and to men. We admit, that 
these are fragments of Ignatius : but they are not Igna- 
tius ! 

See how Mr. Powell, an English " Wesleyan Minister," as 
he writes himself on the title-page of his work, thus boldly 
avowing in the outset the fearful principle, " I of Paul, and I 
of Apollos, and I of Wesley" see how he severs member 
from member, and holds them aloft as the body and soul of 
Ignatius. The capitals are Mr. Powell's. In the right-hand 
column Mr. Powell's " select fragments" will be found in 
brackets []. 



THE MANGLED IGNATIUS. 

I. " The Deacon is subject to the 
Presbyters, as to the Law of Je- 
sus Christ." — Ep. to Magn. 



THE TRUE IGNATIUS. 

I. " Seeing then that I have 
been thought worthy to see you 
by Damas, your godly and excel- 
lent Bishop, and by your worthy 
Presbyters, Bassus and Apolloni- 
us, and by my fellow-servant, So- 
tio, [the Deacon,] in whom I re- 
joice, because he [is subject] to 
his Bishop as unto the grace of 
God, and [to the Presbyters as to 
the Law of Jesus Christ."] 



The words in brackets, picked out and put together, make up 
Mr. Powell's quotation. This Epistle was written to the 
Church of Magnesia, in Syria, from Smyrna, where Ignatius 
tarried for a brief space, on his way to a martyr's crown. 
Here he saw 14 the Apostle Polycarp," and hither the neigh- 
boring Churches of Asia sent their Bishops, Presbyters, and 
Deacons, to take their last farewell of him. The Church 



PRESBYTERLANTSM AMONG THE FATHERS. 459 



of Magnesia sent Damas, their Bishop ; Bassus and Apollo- 
nius, their Presbyters ; and Sotio, their Deacon. Ignatius 
even names them, and exhorts the Magnesians not to "de- 
spise the youth of their Bishop," and to " submit themselves 
to him, yet not to him but to the Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, the Bishop of us all." Who could have be- 
lieved that an unjesuitized Christian could have represented 
the above as being the sense or sentence of Ignatius 1 Yet 
this is but the beginning. Let us go on. 

THE MANGLED IGNATIUS. THE TRUE IGNATIUS. 

II. "The Presbytery preside II. "Study to do all things in 
in the place of the council of the a divine concord ; your Bishop 
Apostles." — Ep. to Magn. presiding in the place of God, and 

your [Presbyters in the place of 
the council of the Apostles,'] and 
your Deacons, who are most dear 
to me, being entrusted with the 
ministry of Jesus Christ" 

This Epistle it is, too, that speaks of "your most worthy 
Bishop, and the well-woven spiritual crown of your Pres- 
bytery, and youi- godly Deacons." 



THE MANGLED IGNATIUS. 

III. "Be ye subject to your 
Presbyters as to the Apostles of 
Jesus Christ, our hope." — Ep. to 
Trail. 



THE TRUE IGNATIUS. 

III. " Do nothing without your 
Bishop, even as ye are wont ; also 
[be ye subject to your Presbyters, 
as to the Apostles of Jesus Christ, 
our hope.] .... In like manner, 
let all reverence the Deacons" 



This Epistle also was written from Smyrna, whither the 
Trallians had sent Polybius their Bishop, (actually named in 
the Epistle,) to greet the martyr on his triumphal way. And 
the martyr begs them, "Remember in your prayers the 
Church of Syria" as, in his Epistle to the Romans, he calls 
himself not tlte pastor of Antioch, but the Bishop of Syria, 



460 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



saying, " Ye can do me no greater favor than to suffer me to 
be offered up to God, now that the altar is prepared ; that 
when ye shall be gathered together in love, ye may sing 
praises to the Father, through Christ Jesus, that he hath 
vouchsafed that a Bishop of Syria should be found to call him 
from the east unto the west ;" and again, " Remember in 
your prayers the Church of Syria, which now enjoys God for 
its Shepherd instead of me." Pray, why could not the Pres- 
byters of Antioch get another " Moderator ?" In Sec. 3, of 
this Epistle to the Trallians, he speaks of himself as a " con- 
demned criminal," yet " commanding as an Apostle — "* 
w£ dtfocVoXos. " But," he adds, " I refrain myself, lest I perish 
in my boasting." 



THE MANGLED IGNATIUS. 

IV. "Let all remember the 
Presbyters as the Sanhedrim of 
God, and College of Apostles." 
— Ep. to TralL 



V. "See that ye follow the 
Presbyters as the Apostles." — Ep. 
to Smyrn. 



THE TRUE IGNATIUS. 

IV. "Let all reverence the 
Deacons as Jesus Christ ; and the 
Bishop as the Father; and the 
[Presbyters as the Sanhedrim of 
God, and College of the Apostles.'] 
Without these there is no Church." 
He then speaks of their Bishop 
Polybius, who had come to "re- 
joice with him in his bonds," whose 
" mildness" and " love" should pro- 
voke their " reverence," for his 
very " " look is instruction, and his 
gentleness is power." 

V. [" See that ye all follow] 
your Bishop, as Jesus Christ fol- 
lowed the Father ; [and the Pres- 
byters as the Apostles ;] and rever- 



* In Sec. 4, of his Ep. to the Romans, Ignatius says, "I command you not as 
Peter and Paul did. They were Apostles, I, a condemned man ; they were free, but 
I hitherto a servant. But if I shall suffer, I shall then be free," which seems to us 
an Ignatian method, borrowed from St. Paul, of asserting his Apostleship. (See 
Jerome's testimony of this " ecclesiastical Prince," and " Bishop of Asia," and 
Chrysostom's " Apostle of Asia." 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 461 



ence the Deacons, as the command 
of G-od. Let no one do any thing 
of what belongs to the Church, 
separately from the Bishop. 

This Epistle was written after Ignatius had passed through 
Smyrna, and had arrived at Troas; and, together with his 
Epistle to the noble Polycarp, their Bishop, is full of indi- 
rect allusions to the relative powers of the officers of their 
Church, whom he had seen and known and learned to love. 
Thus he says, " Your prayer is come to the Church of Antioch 
which is in Syria; whence being sent in chains, the fittest 
ornament of a servant of God, I salute all the Churches, not 
as though I were worthy to take my name from that Church, 

being the least among them It is fitting, and for the 

honor of God, that .your Church should appoint some worthy 
delegate, who, being come as far as Syria, may rejoice with 
them, in that they are at peace, and are again restored to 
their former greatness, and have again received their proper 
body." Perhaps the Presbytery had elected a " Moderator !" 
History tells us, however, that the successor of Ignatius was 
Heros. But to proceed : " Send some one from you with an 
Epistle," says Ignatius, "to congratulate them upon the 
calm which hath been given them of God, and that through 
your prayers they have now attained a harbor." Again, to 
Polycarp he writes concerning the person to be sent into 
Syria, " Grace be ever with him, and with Polycarp who 
sends him." So Ignatius rejoices that the Church at Ephesus 
had sent their " Bishop" Onesimus to meet him on his way ; 
and this from Ephesus, which in the days^of Timothy had its 
plurality of Presbyters — "your renowned Presbytery," as 
Ignatius calls them. And that there may be no mistake 
about the rank of these Presbyters, he uses, in the Epistle to 
the Philadelphians, the expression, " some, Bishops ; and 
others, Priests and Deacons ;" speaking of the different 

89* 



462 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



grades of persons sent by the Churches in Syria to meet and 
greet him on his way to martyrdom. 

But to return to Mr. Powell. After holding up these dis- 
membered fragments to the " Wesleyans," Mr. Powell adds, 
with all the coolness imaginable, " all the above passages are 
from Archbishop Wake's translation.''' How to deal with such 
a statement we are entirely at a loss. Yes, they are "from 
Archbishop Wake's translation," that is, a few words picked 
out " from " entire sentences : but, as we have seen, they 
are not Ignatius ! Rather than put forth such spurious things 
to guide the awakening world to the ancient church of God, 
would we lay down, upon a chart, safe bays and harbors 
where there were rocks and shoals, or cut pieces out of coin 
and stamp them with the value of the whole. We are sorry 
to see the Methodists re-issuing this book, of which we have 
given the errors of but one half-page ! Never mind. En- 
lightened Methodists, as well as Presbyterians of other names, 
are discovering the cheat. Mr. Powell felt compelled to say 
something, and fall-length quotations would not suit his pur- 
pose : felt compelled, we say, for the Wesleyans, in a late 
annual report in England, represent that the number of their 
ministers and members had fallen off the previous year, and 
a single Bishop (of Salisbury, I believe) had received applica- 
tions (as I myself heard when in England about that time) 
from some seventy Wesleyan preachers, for a better ordina- 
tion. 

Where is this to end 1 How are we to account for mis- 
representations that would dishonor even a Jesuit? The 
mildest explanation we can think of is, that modern traditions 
have supplanted all recurrence to the originals, one dissenter 
quoting from another back to Lord King ; while it is not 
even known that he was answered, silenced and, it is believed, 
converted, by the admirable work of Sclater. Though we 
cannot say the times of this ignorance are past, yet the neces- 



PRESBYTEMANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 463 



sity for it no longer exists ; for an accurate translation of the 
Epistles of Clement, (" whose name was in the book of life,") 
of Polycarp and Ignatius, (disciples of St. John,) and of the 
work of Justin Martyr, may now be had, in a single small 
volume, at a trifling expense; and, to the Christian and 
scholar, they present most pleasing and precious treasures* 
of literature and piety, some of them having been read for 
generations in the primitive Church, along with the sacred * 
writings, and being excelled, in richness and beauty, only by 
the prophets and evangelists. Gentlemen, read them. You 
will look back upon the time thus employed, as among the 
best-spent hours of your life. These admonitions to adhere 
to the Bishops, Presbyters, and Deacons, as the expression 
of the Church's unity, are the least part of these Epistles, 
poured by the wayside from the bosom of a man on his way 
to be offered^ up at Rome. To the Churches in the East he 
addresses these earnest exhortationsf to purity and unity, in 
the unity of the altar and of the ministry, because the Gnostics 
had everywhere corrupted that purity and threatened that 
unity : but to the Church of Rome, not so disturbed, or else 
too remote for him to know its circumstances, he does not 
introduce the subject. To the rest he names it, and in 
strains how musical. " Your renowned Presbytery (Ephesus) 
is fitted to the Bishop, as the strings are to a harp ; so that, 
in your concord and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung ; 
and every single person among you makes up the chorus ; 
that all being in concord, ye take up the song of God in per- 

* Particularly the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, which, in its style and 
majesty and force of reasoning, singularly resembles St. Paul's Epistle to the He- 
Drews ; and this, perhaps, has suggested to Neander the idea, that the Epistle to the 
Hebrews was written by some one bearing, to St. Paul, the relation borne to 
Luther by Melancthon. 

+ These have been alleged as reasons to suspect the authenticity of the Epistles : 
but to my mind they are evidence of their genuineness ; for we have reason to sus- 
pect, from the Epistles and Gospel of St. John, that, in the Eastern Churches, the 
Gnostics had already begun their work. 



464 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



feet unity, that He may hear you and perceive that ye are 
members of His Son." And again, (to the Magnesians,) 
"With your most worthy Bishop, and the well-woven spir- 
itual crown of your Presbyters, and your godly Deacons; 
that so there be among you a unity both in body and in 
spirit." You have indeed a treat before you, if you are yet 
to read these incomparable writings. How delightful to hear 
.men speak who spake with Peter and Paul and John, and on 
whom the mantle of those Apostles fell ! 

Thus it has been my office, as it has been of others — in 
humble measure like the task of the pious ones who gathered 
up the bones and fragments of the venerable martyr when 
the wild beasts had made their meal — it has been our office 
to bring back into their places the scraps and fragments torn 
out of the heart and body of this renowned Apostle, and ex- 
hibit the symmetry and beauty of the true Ignatius once 
more. When this noble martyr and "Apostle," as Chrysos- 
tom calls him, was loaded with his chains at Antioch, he 
sweetly styled them "his spiritual jewels, and the most fitting 
ornaments of the servant of God." And even as he pro- 
gressed further in his journey, " Now," said he, " I begin to 
be a Disciple ; the nearer to the sword, the nearer to God." 
And to prevent the brethren at Rome from unseasonable 
officiousness in attempting to rescue him, he says, " Do not 
hinder me, nor love my flesh, for then I shall again have my 
course to run ; for when the wild beasts shall be my sepul- 
chre, then I shall be Christ's disciple ; when I shall be with 
the wild beasts, I shall be with God." But I trow that his 
mighty heart would have sunk within him, to see the unity 
of the Church broken as it is now, and as he himself pre- 
dicted ; and the dreadful work promoted by mangled half- 
sentences out of those writings hi which his last breathings 
were for the unity of the Church, in the unity of her Altar 
and her Bishop. 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG- THE FATHERS. 465 



One act of justice more, and I have done. Men had told 
me that Jerome was at heart a Presbyterian ; and I believed 
it, until I asked him, and he told me a thousand times, " No." 
But, as in Scripture, there are statements seemingly at vari- 
ance with fundamental doctrines elsewhere clearly inculcated : 
so in Jerome there may be passages, apparently varying from 
the truth of the Episcopacy running through all his writings. 
He wrote toward the year 400. His famous Epistle to Eva- 
grius (or, according to the Benedictine edition, to Evangelus) 
runs thus, in the translation of Dr. Miller, which we accept so 
far as it goes ; desiring the reader to notice that he stops pre- 
cisely where Jerome comes to the gist and marrow of the 
matter. To make this evident, we shall enclose in < brackets 
the parts quoted by Dr. Miller, to which we shall add the 
omitted parts of the Epistle. 

EPISTLE OF JEROME. 

" We read in Isaiah, that ' The vile person will speak vil- 
lany.' [I hear that a certain person has broken out into such 
folly, that he prefers Deacons before Presbyters, that is, 
before Bishops; for when the Apostles clearly teach that 
Presbyters and Bishops were the same, who can endure it, 
that a minister of tables should proudly exalt himself above 
those at whose prayers the body and blood of Christ is 
made f* Do you seek for authority ? Hear that testimony, 
4 Paul and Timothy, servants of Jesus Christ, to all the saints 
in Christ Jesus that are at Philippi, with the Bishops and 
Deacons.' Would you have another example 1 In the Acts 
of the Apostles, Paul speaks thus to "the Priestsf of one 
Church, 'Take heed to yourselves, and to all the flock over 

* Conficitur. I find the phrase elsewhere, conficere chrisma. To say " made," 
may not, therefore, convey the sense intended. 

t Not Ruling Elders, by the bye, as the Doctor a while ago made them out, in 
the Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians. Do make them one thing or the other. 
Are they ruling Elders ? Or are they Bishops ? 



466 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



which the Holy Ghost hath made you Bishops ; that you 
govern the Church which He hath purchased with His own 
blood.' And lest any should contend about there being a 
plurality of Bishops in one Church, hear also another testi- 
mony, by which it may most manifestly be proved, that a 
Bishop and Presbyter are the same : ' For this cause left I 
thee in Crete, that thou shouldst set in order the things that 
are wanting, and ordain Presbyters in every city, as I have 
appointed thee. If any be blameless, the husband of one 
wife, &c. For a Bishop must be blameless, as the steward 
of God.' And to Timothy, ' Neglect not the gift that is in 
thee, which .was given thee by prophecy, by* the laying on 
of the hands of the Presbytery.' And Peter also, in his 1st 
Epistle, saith, ' The Presbyters which are among you I ex- 
hort, who am also a Presbyter, and a witness of the suffer- 
ings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that shall be 
revealed ; to rule the flock of Christ and to inspect it, not of 
constraint, but willingly, according to God ;' which is more 
significantly expressed in the Greek, — 'Erfitixotfovvrsg, that is, 
superintending it, whence the name of Bishop is drawn. Do 
the testimonies of such men seem small to thee % Let the 
evangelical trumpet sound, 'the Son of Thunder' whom 
Jesus loved much, who drank the streams of doctrine from 
our Saviour's breast : ' The Presbyter to the elect lady whom 
I love in the truth.' And in another Epistle, ' The Presbyter 
to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in the truth.' But that 
one was afterwards chosen, f who should be set above the 
rest, was done [Mr. Powell here foists in the words ' after the 
Apostles' times,' and puts 1 after* in italics] as a remedy 

* Gr., with. Jerome makes it also the gift of prophecy ; both of them careless 
quotations. 

+ If this be insisted on, the quotation from Hilary, about Egypt, must be given 
up ; for Hilary tells us the ancient usage there was for the next Presbyter to be 
made Bishop, and that the resort to an election was never had until a Council or- 
dered it, to prevent abuses. 



PRESBYTEBIANISM AMONG- THE FATHEES. 467 



against schism ; lest every one, drawing the Church of Christ 
to himself, should break it in pieces. For at Alexandria,* 
from Mark the Evangelist to Heraclas and Dionysius the 
Bishops thereof, the Presbyters always named [perhaps nom- 
inated} one, chosen from among them and placed in a higher 
degree, Bishop. As if an army should make an Emperor, or 
the Deacons should choose one of themselves whom they 
knew to be- most diligent, and call him Archdeacon."] 



DR. MILLER. 

And a little afterwards, in the 
same Epistle, he says, [But stop, 
Doctor ! Why do you skip ? Go 
straight on, as we do in the oppo- 
site column. We are not afraid of 
Jerome : are you ?] 



JEROME CONTINUED. 

"For -what doth a Bishop do, 
ORDINATION EXCEPTED, 
which a Presbyter may not do ? 
Nor is the Church of the city of 
Eome to be considered one, and 
the Church of the whole world 
another. Gaul, and Britain, and 
Africa, and Persia, and the East, 
and India, and all the barbarous 
nations, worship one Christ, keep 
to one rule of faith. If authority 
is desired, the world is greater 
than a city. Wherever there is 
a Bishop, whether at Rome or at 
Eugubium, whether at Constanti- 
nople or at Rhegium, whether at 
Alexandria or at Tanis, he is of 
the same validity (meriti) and of 



* Jerome says, "Presbyteri semper unum ex se electum, in excelsiori gradu 
collocatum, Episcopum nominabant." Dr. Mason produces an " analogous pas- 
sage" from Caesar's Bridge over the Rhine, "Trgna bina sesquipedalia paulum 
ab imo praeacuta, dimensa ad altitudinem fluminis, intervallo pedum duorum, 
inter se jungebaty ' and thinks that if Caesar did the sharpening and measuring as 
well as joining, the Presbyters did the putting the Bishop into a higher degree, 
and talks of " the hands" of Caesar. Now, as we doubt whether Caesar ever worked 
a beam of that bridge at all with his own hands, so we doubt whether the Presbyters 
ever touched their Bishop's head to ordain him. We believe ourselves that the 
peculiar phraseology implies that the Presbyters in Egypt only nominated (nomina- 
bant) their Bishop ; while the election, as well as the rest of the proceedings, was 
consummated by the Bishops. 



468 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



Here Dr. Miller resumes the 
quotation : [" Presbyter and Bish- 
op ; one is the name of age ; the 
other, of dignity. Whence, in the 
Epistles to Timothy and Titus, 



the same priesthood. Neither the 
power of wealth, nor the weakness 
of poverty, can make a Bishop 
more exalted or more depressed ; 
but they are all SUCCESSORS 
OF THE APOSTLES. But you 
say, How is it that at Rome a 
Presbyter is ordained on the tes- 
timonial of a Deacon- ? Why do 
you cast up to me the custom of 
one city? Why do you justify 
'this paucity, [of the deacons,] out 
of which lias arisen a disdain for 
the laws of the Church? That 
which is scarce is the more sought 
after. In India penn}^ -royal is more 
costly than pepper. The paucity 
of the Deacons causes them to be 
held in honor ; the multitude of 
the Presbyters causes them to- be 
despised. But even in the Church 
of Ro:me the Presbyters sit, and 
the Deacons stand; although, as 
disorders increase by degrees, I 
may have seen a Deacon, in the 
absence of a Bishop, sit among the 
Presbyters, and at domestic feasts 
give benediction to the Presbyters. 
Let those who do this, too, under- 
stand that they do not well ; and 
let them hear the Apostles, ' It is 
not meet that we should leave the 
word of God to serve tables. Let 
them know why Deacons were 
appointed ; let them read the Acts 
of the Apostles ; let them remem- 
ber their rank. [Presbyter and 
Bishop : one is the name of age ; 
the other, of dignity. Whence, in 
the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG- THE FATHERS. 469 



there is mention made of the ordi- 
nation of Bishop and Deacon, but 
not of Presbyter, because the Pres- 
byter is included in the Bishop."] 
Here the Doctor again dropped 
the quotation, as he would a live 
coal ; the " Apostolical tradition" 
in the other column will explain 
why. 



there is mention made of the ordi- 
nation of Bishop and Deacon, but 
not of Presbyter, because the Pres- 
byter is included in the Bishop.] 
He who is promoted, is promoted 
from less to greater. Either then 
let a Deacon be ordained out of a 
Presbyter, that a Presbyter may 
be shown to be less than a Dea- 
con, into whom he grows up from 
something small : or, if a Presby- 
ter is ordained out of a Deacon, 
he should know that he becomes 
meaner in emolument, but greater 
in Priesthood. And that we may 
know the Apostolical traditions 
taken from the Old Testament, that 
which Aaron, and his sons, and the 
Levites were, in the Temple: that 
let the Bishops, and Presbyters 
and Deacons, claim to be, in the 
Church:' 



The reader has now before him the entire Epistle — no 
thanks to the Presbyterians ! Pray, why did the good Doc- 
tor omit the words, " What does a Bishop do, ORDINATION 
EXCEPTED, that a Presbyter may not do ?" and resume 
his quotation further on 1 Did he see it 1 He must have seen 
it : for, on the very next leaf in his " Letters on the Ministry," 
he says, "Some zealous Episcopal writers have endeavored to 
destroy the force of these express declarations of Jerome, by 
quoting other passages, in which he speaks of Bishops and 
Presbyters in the current language of his time ; for instance, 
in one place, speaking of that pre-eminence which Bishops had 
then attained, he asks, ' What can a Bishop do, that a Pres- 
byter may not also do, excepting ordination V " " For instance, 
in one place f " Other passages ?" No, Sir ! The words are 
in that very Epistle. Nay, they are the very next words in 

40 



470 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



that Epistle ! If a Jesuit had written thus, we should have 
felt a glow of shame for the ill-concealed evasion. But we 
must forgive the Doctor, and reserve all hard feeling for 
those who not only represent this as " another passage," but 
leave out of it the words, '''■ordination excepted." The last 
writer guilty of this, is Dr. Eddy of Newark ; whose book, 
after doing the^ Church good service in New Jersey, was 
wisely bought up and suppressed. 

" In like manner," proceeds the Doctor, " in another 
place" ^another place/2" No," my dear Sir! In the same 
place, right on before your eyes in the very same argument — 
Proceed !] " Jerome makes a kind of loose comparison be- 
tween the offices of the Christian Church and the Jewish 
Priesthood ; these passages, however, furnish nothing in sup- 
port of the Episcopal cause ; Jerome, when writing on 
ordinary occasions, spoke of Episcopacy as it then stood; but 
when he undertook explicitly to deliver an opinion respecting 
primitive Episcopacy, he expressed himself in the words we 
have seen ; and to attempt to set vague allusions, in opposi- 
tion to such express and unequivocal passages in which the 
writer professedly and formally lays down a doctrine, reasons 
at great length, and deliberately deduces his conclusion, is as 
absurd as it is uncandid." Why then, Doctor, did you not 
save yourself the imputation of being " uncandid and absurd," 
by letting your readers and your classes see, if not the 
"reasons" at their "length," at least "the conclusion he 
deliberately deduces," and to which he comes in the last 
words of this very argument : — " That which Aaron, and his 
sons, and the Levites were, in the Temple : that let the Bishops, 
and Presbyters, and Deacons claim to be, in the Church". 
Call ye this " a kind of loose comparison" or " a vague allu- 
sion," or a "passage in another place where he is not called 
to speak of the system established by the Apostles V Nay, 
it is the very cap-stone to the argument. A Deacon at 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 471 



Kome alleges the inferiority of Presbyters to Deacons. 
Jerome is roused. He uses sundry arguments to put the 
assumption down: 1. Presbyters "make (conficiunt) the 
body and blood of Christ," just as well as a Bishop. 2. 
They and the Bishops went anciently by the name of Pres- 
byters, and vice versa. 3. Even Apostles call themselves 
Presbyters, (a poor argument, because the Apostles still 
oftener call . themselves Deacons ; thus, " Who then is Paul, 
and who is Apollos, but ministers (Gr. Deacons) by whom, 
&c.") 4. At Alexandria, it had been the custom from the 
first, for the Presbyters to elect a Bishop, not from among 
the Deacons, but out of their own order — a thing to which 
Deacons are incompetent. 5. This argument the Doctor 
does not notice ; it proves too much (for him) ; " What does 
a Bishop, ordination excepted, that a Presbyter may not do % n 
If a Bishop may preach, bless, absolve, do pastoral duty, 
consecrate the awful mysteries : so may a Presbyter ; all — 
all except ordination ; for the Presbyters were set first over 
the Church, reasons Jerome, and one need never have been 
placed over them, if "schism" could have been otherwise 
avoided, and unity preserved. 6. This argument the Doctor 
also passes over, as irrelevant to his purpose ; but it is a 
capital one, and one that we should expect a Jesuit, indeed, 
to omit, (for it is death to the supremacy of Rome,) but why 
the Doctor ? The argument is this : Let not this Roman 
Deacon carry his head so high, presuming on the pride of the 
great city, and the countenance of his Bishop ; for whether 
at Rome, or Constantinople, or Alexandria, or elsewhere, 
powerful or feeble, poor or rich, the Bishops are all equal, 
for "they are all the successors of the Apostles!" 
Jerome's 7th was also good: that when Deacons are pro- 
moted, they are promoted to be Presbyters; but it were 
absurd to say Presbyters should be promoted to be Deacons. 
But of Jerome's 8th and last argument, the Doctor could 



472 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



not see the point at all; the "apostolical tradition," that 
"u'hat Aaron, and his sons, and the Levites were, in the Tem- 
ple : the same let the Bishops, the Presbyters, and the Deacons 
claim to be, in the Church.''' This is the conclusion of the 
whole matter ; with this ends the Epistle. I have pro- 
duced it entire, because I do not remember to have seen 
it entire elsewhere : and, mutilated and mangled as I had 
always seen it, it appeared to # me " conclusively in favor 
of the Presbyterians." When I opened Jerome, and found 
that the passages which Dr. Miller told us were to be 
found "in another place," "where Jerome speaks of Epis- 
copacy in the ancient language of his day," were, in one 
case, the very next icords to his own quotation from this 
Epistle, and, in the other, were the conclusion and last 
words of the argument : I could hardly have been more 
astounded had I seen the heavens above me spanned in bla- 
zing letters with Jerome's "Ordinatione excepta," or 
if Aaron and the whole tribe of Levi had appeared in 
" white linen," to announce the correctness of Jerome's " tra- 
dition," that they were but predecessors of the three Orders 
in the Apostolic Church !* 

* There is a singular fragment, placed among the writings of Augnstine, (although 
not his. i and by some ascribed to Hilary the Deacon, oa -account of words in it al- 
most verbatim the same with those of Hilary respecting the Presbyters in Egypt, 
which is so much more like this letter of Jerome, that to me it seems reasonable to 
assign it to his pen. It has the remarkable title. •• Concerning the boasting of the 
Roman Levites." The following is a synopsis : — 

"Falcidius. a Roman Deacon, presuming on the wealth and power confided to his 
office, dared to sit among or above the Presbyters"' — w temerity" — M presumption" — 
"audacity to make servants equal to their masters — Levites, messengers and bur- 
den-bearers of the temple, hewers of wood and drawers of water, equal to the 
priest ! Deacons are not made of Presbyters, but Presbyters of Deacons, the higher 
including the lower— a Presbyter was, in the times of Timothy, called a Bishop; 
and a Bishop is but the Primate-Presbyter, (Primus Presbyter,) that is, Highest 
Priest (summits sacerdos) — a Bishop calls Presbyters his felloic Presbyters or Priests. 
Then follows the case in Egypt, if the Bishop be absent, a Presbyter (consecrat) 
performs acts of consecration — not ordains ; for then it would have been in the 
plural, Presbyteri consecrant. Then the objection, Why is a Presbyter ordained by' 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 473 



But there is one passage more from the works of Jerome.* 
After showing, as in the Epistle to Evangelus, that Presbyter 
and Bishop were at first interchangeable titles, he proceeds : 
" And before that, by the instinct of the Devil, there were 
parties in religion, and it was said among the people, I am of 
Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas : the Churches were 
governed by the common council of Presbyters. But after- 
wards, when every one thought that those whom he baptized 
were rather his, than Christ's, it was determined, throughout 
the whole world, that one chosen from the Presbyters should 
be set above the rest, to whom all the care of the Church 
should belong, that the seeds of schism should be taken 
away." Jerome then adduces the same text as in his Epistle, 
and proceeds : " these things I have written to show that, 
among the ancients, Bishop and Presbyter were the same. 
But by little and little, [paulatim — by degrees,] that all the 
seeds of dissension might be plucked up, the whole care was 
devolved on one. As, therefore, the Presbyters know that 
by the custom of the Church they are subject to him who is 
their President, [propositus fuerit — who has been set over 
them :] so let the Bishops know that they are above Presby- 
ters more by the custom of the Church, than by the true dis- 
pensation [or literally, disposition] of Christ; and that they 
ought to rule the Church in common, imitating Moses, who, 
when he might alone have ruled the people of Israel, chose 
seventy, with whom he might judge the people." 

the concurrence (obsequio) of the Deacons? is met by saying, that a man in the 
ranks is not made equal to the General of an army, simply by the fact that the 
army express their consent by their acquiescence, (obsequio.)" It seems scarcely 
possible that different pens could have written these two arguments ; at least they 
are productions of the same period, and make good the often repeated argument 
of Jerome, that Bishop, Priest, and Deacon are the High Priest, Priest, and Levite 
of the Church: an argument first used by Clement, ("whose name is in the book 
of life,") in that most admirable and sublime Epistle to the Corinthians, which 
Presbyterians are not allowed to see. 

* Com. on Tit. i. 5. 
40* 



4:74 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Although this is merely the opinion of J erome respecting 
the manner in which Bishops came to be set over the Pres- 
byters, yet I am quite disposed to adopt it, and every part 
of it, as my own. As God did not give the world a Revela- 
tion until the world was made to feel the want of it ; as He 
did not send a Saviour, until the condition of the world 
made it painfully necessary : so it was part of the same wis- 
dom to delay the distribution of Orders in the Church, until 
the Church, by severely suffering from the want of them, 
should be prepared to welcome and appreciate the gift. Our 
Lord did not ordain Deacons in advance, as if the treasury 
were to be the great subject of concern at first : but his 
Apostles ordained them when the revenues of the Church be- 
came burdensome, and the complaints of the poor made it 
expedient. Presbyters, though prior in dignity to the Dea- 
cons, came after them in point of time : but not so much by 
the Lord's personal direction, as by 'the subsequent direction 
of his Apostles, when believers were multiplied in every city, 
and could no longer be safely left to the irresponsible charge 
and instruction of each other. It is the law of the Kingdom 
of Grace, that the want shall precede the provision. And now, 
with travelling Apostles, and fixed pastors and Deacons, the 
Church might have been left to grow and fill the earth. But 
the " seeds of dissension" soon sprang up among the Presby- 
ters themselves, and that these seeds might be choked in the 
germ, one of their own number was set over them as a Bishop. 
Thus, if Dr. Miller had read this very commentary on the 
last chapter of the Epistle to Titus, he would have seen the 
explanation, that the Apollos there mentioned was " the Bishop 
of Corinth," and was the same Apollos whols spoken of in that 
passage to the Corinthians, Every one of you saith, I am of 
Paul, and I of Apollos, &c. ; who, "on account of the dissen- 
sions at Corinth" had retired to Crete, but was about now to 
return, on the pacification of his Church by the letters of 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 475 



Paul; and that Zenas was also "an Apostolical man," 
charged with the same work with Apollos, of building " the 
Churches ;" moreover, that Titus, another " Apostolical man," 
must not come to Paul, until he should send Artemas to take 
his place," or Tychicus to be his " successor.'' 1 By-the-bye, to 
these " Apostolical men," or companions of St. Paul, Jerome, 
on the next leaf,* attributes the inditing, in part, of St. Paul's 
Epistles ; for so he accounts for the association of Sosthenes, 
Sylvanus, and Timotheus, with St. Paul, in writing them : not 
only, says Jerome, " that the Epistles may have more author- 
ity 11 but because there was " no emulation among the apos- 
tles ; Paul very gladly inserting in his Epistles whatever the 
Spirit suggested to the others, thus exemplifying his own 
command to the Corinthians, that if, while one prophesied, 
the Spirit revealed any thing to another sitting by, the former 
should hold his peace." This is going rather far, Doctor, with 
regard to these " Apostolical men !" Can you keep company 
with " famous Jerome ?" 

Dr. Miller says, that the phrase " I of Paul, and I of Apol- 
los, &c," is applicable to all periods, and does not settle the 
question whether it was "half a century or two centuries 
before the ' whole world' came to an agreement on the sub- 
ject." Surely Dr. Miller never read Jerome to the end of 
the Epistle, in which the dissensions at Corinth, and the return 
of Apollos, the Bishop of the Corinthians, to his distracted 
flock, are mentioned in conjunction. So, at Ephesus, "griev- 
ous wolves" had rent " the flock ;" some " had turned aside 
to vain jangling, without understanding what they said, or 
whereof they affirmed;" and, in this emergency, Timothy is 
set over them. In Crete, also, were " many unruly and vain 
talkers and deceivers, whose mouths must be stopped, giving 
heed to Jewish fables." " Under these circumstances," says 
Dr. Miller, " Paul sent special missionaries" — call them so, 

* Comm. on Ep. to Philemon. 



476 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Doctor, if you please — " immediately empowered by a per- 
son of acknowledged authority .... to curb the unruly, .... 
to repress the ambition of those who would thrust themselves 
into the ministry ; to select and ordain others of more worthy 
character, and, in general, to set in order the affairs of these 
Churches." In relating these "circumstances," the Doctor, 
having elsewhere argued that there were, perhaps, no Presby- 
ters in Crete or in Ephesus before, incautiously adds :* " The 
ministers residing there were probably themselves involved in 
disputes and animosities, and therefore could not be considered 
suitable persons to compose tumults and settle differences." 

Really this is as well said as we could have said it our- 
selves ; and Jerome, and Dr. Miller, and Dr. Miller's pupil, 
are at last all of the same mind : that, if Presbyters had been 
either more or less than men, there never would have been 
reason " throughout the whole world " to set a Presbyter, or, 
as the Doctor calls him, "a special missionary," above the 
others. So there never would have been Deacons, if the 
Church could have done without them, or there had been no 
poor; no Presbyters, if there had been no jangling among the 
laity ; no Apostles, if there had been no heathenism ; no Sa- 
viour, if there had been no sin ; no Revelation, if there had been 
no ignorance. It is one of the beautiful ways of God : even- 
ing before morning ; chaos before order ; sin before redemp- 
tion ; the want before the provision ; and, if you please, Pres- 
byters before Bishops. So Jerome thought. So I think too. 
So things go still. It is " by degrees" that the Church of En- 
gland sends forth her Bishops to preside over her Church 
collected from the heathen. It is " by degrees" that our own 
dioceses are provided with their Bishops. It was " by degrees" 
that the United States obtained Bishops at last, after nearly 
two centuries of opposition from the Puritans. It was " by 
degrees" that Deacons and Presbyters were established, in one 

* Letters, p. 103. 



PRESBYTEBJANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 477 



place after another, by the Apostles. Why, Doctor, it was 
" by degrees'" 1 that the world was made ! No one ever dream- 
ed that a Church " booted and spurred by the grace of God," 
as Dr. Cox reverently says, sprang from the brain of St. Paul 
or St. Peter — Bishops, Presbyters, and Deacons, all complete 
— any more than that the world sprang perfect and finished 
from the hand of God at once. If long geological cycles must 
elapse before the one can become fit for the abode of man : so 
a few years were necessary to rear, in its beauty, the spiritual 
temple that was to become the dwelling-place of God and of 
the Lamb ! 

Finally, I have found what previous Episcopal writers on 
this subject have not, I think, noticed : the explanation of 
this phrase " by degrees" out of the Commentary of Jerome 
himself.* 

Paulatim vero, tempore proce- By degrees, (or as Dr. Miller 
dente, et alii ab his quos Dominus might say, " by little and little,") 
elegerat ordinati sunt Apostoli ; in process of time, others also were 

ordained Apostles by those whom 
the Lord had chosen ; 

"as in that passage to the Philip pians, Epaphroditus your 
Apostle ; also to the Corinthians, They are the Apostles of the 
Churches ; Silas also, and J ude, are called Apostles by the 
Apostles." Here we have not only this same word, " by de- 
grees" which Presbyterians spread over five centuries; but it is 
hampered by the phrase " in process of time ," implying more 
deliberation still : yet, " by degrees, in process of time, 
others were ordained Apostles" not five -hundred years after 
— but " by those whom the Lord had chosen" such as Epaph- 
roditus, Silas, Jude, &c.f The Episcopacy being introduced 

* Comm. on Gal. i. 19. 

t " In process of time," is also the very expression used by Theodoret, of the 
period when the first Bishops of the Church began to lay aside the name of Apos- 
tles. 



478 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



" as a remedy against schism," is no more an objection 
to Episcopacy, than that Deacons were introduced "as a 
remedy against" poverty, or Presbyters " as a remedy 
against" ignorance. Even the Scriptures of the New Testa- 
ment themselves were introduced " by little and little," and 
were not all received or collected for three hundred years : yet 
which of you will therefore deny the authenticity or the in- 
spiration of the Bible? 

I have now gone over all the important " testimonies of 
the Fathers in favor of Presbyters," that I had once relied on 
for the demolition of Episcopacy. What I have said of my 
own venerable preceptor Dr. Miller, might as truly have 
been said of others " who had writ upon this subject before 
him, and whose steps the Doctor ' most- what treads in :' " as 
well as to those who, since the Doctor, have " most-what" 
trodden in his steps. But I have pursued this course, be- 
cause Dr. Miller has been, by reason of his other virtues, too 
much relied on in his marvellous quotations of the Fathers ; 
and also because I feel it a most grievous wrong, that I have 
been, by this very reliance, personally misled and confirmed 
in my separation from the ancient Church. 

It is evident that the Presbyterian student knows no more 
of the true teaching of the Fathers, than he does of the 
writings of Confucius or the doctrines of the Shaster. If the 
day ever comes when the Fathers shall be read, and it shall 
be seen how Clement took the story from St. Paul, and Igna- 
tius from St. Peter, and Polycarp from St. John, and these 
reached hands to Irenseus and Tertullian and Justin, and these 
again to others, all consenting in the existence of the Episco- 
pacy everywhere, all testifying to "one Altar," "one 
Church," "one Priesthood:" we may begin to hope that 
schism, with its forked tongue, and hundred hands, and ugly 
scowl, and cloven foot, will fly from the Christian sanctuary. 
Laymen, women, and children among the sects, will not read 



PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 479 



the admirable Epistles of Clement, Ignatius, Poly carp, and 
others, on whose heads the Holy Apostles, in awful ordination, 
laid hands that had embraced the Lord : so long as they who 
profess to " sit in Moses' seat" have neither the curiosity nor 
taste to read them. Do, gentlemen, begin with Ignatius! 
When you have read Ignatius, you will long to read Poly carp. 
When you have read Polycarp, you will read " the great and 

I admirable 1 ' Epistle (as Eusebius calls it) to the Corinthians, 
by Clement, St. Paul's "fellow-laborer, whose name is in 
the book of life." When you have read this magnificent 
Epistle, resembling so much in dignity and style the sublime 
Epistle to the Hebrews, that some have regarded Clement as 

| the composer of it under St. Paul's dictation, while your own 

1 Neander goes farther, and thinks it was written by one who 
stood in the relation to St. Paul that Melancthon did to Lu- 
ther : you will desire to learn more, if indeed more shall be 
wanting, to cause you to admire the harmonies of the 
Church, and restore you to the unity and brotherhood, which, 

I though lost in the first Adam, had been festored in the 
Second, until schism crept into the new Paradise, and did 

\ what sin had done in the old. And as the Apostles wisely 

] waited, in some instances, not ordaining resident Apostles or 
Bishops in the Churches until the evils of division had become 
incurable, and competent men had ripened for the office : so 
again, in the wisdom of God, the mischiefs of schism, growing 

| more intolerable and terrific every hour, may be the ap- 
pointed precursors of a unanimity with which, " throughout 

j the whole world," the lovers of ancient truth shall become 
the admirers of ancient order, and there shall be One Fold as 
there is One Shepherd. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



PEACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



" As when a hungry man dreameth, and behold he eateth, 
but he awaketh, and his soul is empty ; or as a thirsty man 
dreameth, and behold he drinketh, but he awaketh, and be- 
hold he is faint :" so I must confess that, while among the 
Presbyterians, I had longings and cravings, which the dogmas 
of my faith could never satisfy. They know it. Their di- 
vines know it. When they have attempted to vindicate the 
ways of God in the decree to give sin existence, they have 
often confessed that, while they sought to satisfy the people, 
they have not felt satisfied themselves. When they have 
smoothed over the tenet of personal election quite to the 
satisfaction of the hearers, I have heard them acknowledge 
that, beyond and behind all this, they themselves saw an un- 
bridged and unfathomable gulf. When they represent the 
sufferings of Christ as "satisfaction" to the " vindicatory jus- 
tice" of God, intended to " appease" God's wrath toward our 
unhappy race ; and those sufferings as of equal commercial 
value with the sufferings of the elect to all eternity : these 
are terms in the proposition from which I know that 
they often, in their heart of hearts, instinctively shrink, if 
they extend to all mankind this substitute of "so much 
suffering" for " so much sin," they are hampered with the 
objection, Why should a just God exact this suffering twice, 



PRACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



481 



once from the innocent, and once from the guilty? If, to 
escape the embarrassment, they adopt the new New En- 
gland heresy, that the sufferings of Christ were merely " an 
exhibition" of God's hatred of sin " by inflicting pain on an 
innocent Person :" the exaction bears still more the appear- 
ance of a wanton and vindictive determination. No wonder 
the mind revolts. No wonder New England falls back into 
Unitarianism, or any other ism that will cling to the Creator 
in His rightful character as the universal Father. On these 
and a thousand cognate points, there were moments when 
my soul was dark ; nor did the day-star dawn into my heart, 
until I came within the Spirit's sphere of the teaching of the 
ancient Church. 

Calvinism sees no purpose of the Incarnation, but that the 
Son of God should suffer. No other purpose seems to occur 
to the mind of Calvinism, than to " satisfy" an offended God, 
and placa'br^ dispose Him toward our unhappy race. Here 
the light of the Catholic religion bursts into my sepulchre ! 
I wipe the cold sweat from my brow, and emerge from the 
darkness of suffocation, in which the corroding chains of Cal- 
vinism held me. 

" God manifest in the flesh !" Not simply man, but made 
" in the likeness of men" and " in fashion as a man :" for " the 
"Word was made flesh;" God was made man; the Divinity- 
Humanity; the God-Man; the "Second Adam" or generic 
Man, comprehending the race ; as the First Adam, or generic 
Man, comprehended the same race before. " The first Adam 
[or the first Man, as the name signifies] was made a living 
soul," and through him the human race ^became partakers of 
his natural life ; " the last Adam (or Man) was made a quick- 
ening Spirit," imparting new life to that race again. As the 
race was a unit in Adam, so it was a unit in Christ ; and the 
Church, like the race, existed as a whole, before it existed in 
its parts. To speak nearly in the words of others : — " In 

41 



482 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Him human nature — elevated by conjunction with Divinity, 
perfected by the discipline of self-denial and suffering, having 
subdued temptation, freed by death from all that is corrupt- 
ible, rendered incorruptible by the resurrection, glorified by 
His ascension — this redeemed Humanity, by the power of 
the Divinity with which it is inseparably united, passes over 
(as did the principle of natural life from the first Man) to the 
members of the second Man, as the principle of their regen- 
eration and perfection. The last Adam (or Man) is made a 
quickening Spirit — a Spirit of regeneration, righteousness, 
sanctification and resurrection : for, ' if the Spirit of Him that 
raised up Jesus from the dead, dwell in you, He that raised 
up Christ from the dead, shall also quicken your mortal 
bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you.' What Christ is 
in Himself, He becomes in us," and, in all that He did, it 
was not the individual person, but the new, the second, the 
generic Man that did it — we in Him, and He^fn'us. The 
presence, moreover, of the second MAN in heaven, is a con- 
tinual recommendation of us to God's mercy, as a pledge, to 
God and all His angels, that they in whom He dwells, by His 
" quickening Spirit" passing over from His Body into ours, 
shall in like manner be presented in heaven free from the de- 
filements and deformities of sin. When the members of the 
universal Church now worship, in the earthly sanctuary, their 
worship is exalted far beyond all sectarian conception, because 
the second Man, the High Priest of the universe, is passed 
into the heavens to appear for us in the Presence of God, and 
to offer for us, and with us, and within us, by a Humanity 
from which every thing on which sin 'had fastened is purged, 
a worthy and boundless worship. And' as " we in Him" do 
worship in heaven, so " He in us," an energizing principle 
carried over into our "mortal bodies," by his Spirit that 
dwelleth in us, worships and is worshipped in the earthly 
house. And as the mere form of man, in which Christ came, 



PRACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



483 



cannot fill all things in heaven and earth at once : so we are 
now " baptized into Christ," " baptized into His body," " and 
are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones," as 
truly as we were of the first Man ; that we might be " His 
Church, which is His Body, the- fulness or pleroma of Him 
that filleth all in all." His bodily presence is in heaven ; it 
is no mystery ; it is no calamity ; the world has the loss 
made up : His members are on the earth — everywhere and 
always — which He, in the body, could not have been. They 
are His eyes to look around and weep with them that weep ; 
His feet to go from scene to scene of want and sorrow ; His 
hands to distribute bread among the poor, and be laid in bless- 
ing on the heads of little ones ; His ears to hear the cry of 
distress along the wayside ; His lips to teach, console, ab- 
solve, and save, and bless the healing waters, and the life- 
imparting cup : in a word, they are, in Him, Prophets, 
Priests, and Kings, "a royal Priesthood," to perpetuate the 
fasts, the prayers, the teachings, the life, the alms-deeds, the 
sufferings, that He began on earth ; yea, to " fill up that which 
is behind of the sufferings of Christ, for His Body's sake, 
which is His Church." And when sectarism shall pass away, 
and the Church again feel that She is but the universal pres- 
ence of the Body of Christ — " the fulness of Him that filleth 
all in all" — how shall the tear of sorrow gladden into joy, and 
the desert blossom as the rose ! 

Our adorable Lord did not teach all who were to be' 
taught, nor feed all who were to be fed, nor heal all that 
were to be healed, nor comfort all that were to be bereaved, 
nor bless all babes that were to be blessed, nor say all that 
was to be said, nor do all that was to be done, nor suffer all 
that was to be suffered, for the world's redemption: for "I," 
said one of His members, "fill up that which is behind of 
the sufferings of Christ, for His Body's sake which is His 
Church." Christ, as the second Adim, soon went out from 



484 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Himself into the Twelve, the seventy, the hundred and 
twenty, the three thousand, the universal Church, to multiply 
and replenish the earth. But the Church was in the Twelve 
before it was in the seventy ; and it was in Christ before it 
was in the Twelve. This blessed Union, whence is derived 
our Life through the " quickening Spirit," is one of the lost 
pearls of Sectarianism. For more than a gloomy century, 
Sectarianism has lost the illustrious doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion in its power, arrays the Son of God in a body, with ter- 
rific ceremony, expressly and solely for the scaffold: and 
cannot understand how all Humanity was sanctified in Him 
by meritorious deeds and sufferings, by prayers and fasts, by 
vigils and victories ; and from its second Adam has inherited 
the universal principle of life. It regards Christ, not as the 
Second Man, but as an isolated person, alike isolated from 
God and men, appeasing the former, and " purchasing" the 
Holy Ghost to be sent, distinctly from himself, and for a 
separate work, to the elect. No Calvinist on earth can tell 
you why Christ fasted: only His Body that perpetuates His 
fast can reveal to you the secret. No Calvinist on earth can 
tell you satisfactorily what meant the awful conflict with the 
devil : only the Church can impart to you this heavenly 
knowledge. No Calvinist on earth can tell you why Christ 
must be an infant, and pass through all the stages of humanity 
up to the final triumph : only the Church can explain the 
blessed mystery. Calvinism asks of Christ only his manly 
form, to " bathe the sword of justice " in His Blood : the 
Catholic religion requires that form to embrace all the states 
and conditions of humanity, that it may sanctify them all, 
and become an energizing principle of life and renovation to 
them all. Sectarianism begins therefore with the full-grown 
man, to effect his regeneration : the Catholic religion begins, 
where redemption in the body of Christ began, with " the 
infant of days." Sectarianism commences by imparting 



PEACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



485 



knowledge : the Catholic religion begins, where its race began, 
by imparting life. Andrew and Peter and Matthew received 
the germ of life, so that they left all and followed Him, 
before they were taught: and the Twelve received the direc- 
tion, "Go, teach (a word badly translated, and literally 
signifying to disciple) all nations, baptizing them in the name, 
&c, teaching them to observe all things, &c." This was the 
natural order in the first Man Adam ; life first, — knowledge 
and improvement afterwards ; and this is the order in the 
second Man ; life first, then faith and progress. Life must 
come before knowledge and faith, else were our children not 
saved. " The Word Avas made Flesh, .... and in Him 
was Life, and the Life was the Light of men." And as the 
infant lives, before it is born : so is this Life " the Light of 
every man that cometh into the world." As, by the natural 
birth, the previous natural life is introduced into a new con- 
dition, more favorable to its development : so, in the wash- 
ing of regeneration, each human being is born again, or 
brought, by Baptism, into the more congenial sphere of the 
Spirit's operations, and the more immediate energization of 
the Body of Christ through the "joints and bands" which 
" knit" it together and " minister nourishment." Our second 
Adam, when baptized in Jordan, in the name of Humanity 
at large, received a pledge and measure of the Spirit, and the 
element of victory in the future conflict in the wilderness; 
and this life, in our individual baptism, is born again into 
conditions more favorable to its progress and its growth. In 
the lands of Paganism, we eat with the woman of Canaan the 
crumbs from the children's table ; and where the energizing 
dews of baptism fall, we are only more positively "a holy 
nation," and come within the Body of Christ, the peculiar 
sphere and presence-temple of the Spirit. The Church is not 
made first of individuals: but proceeds from a Unit, and 
destroys individuality and separatism by drawing all things 

41* 



486 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



to itself. " The communion precedes the reception." The 
" preventing grace" is prior to all knowledge and to all faith. 
There cannot be even faith, without grace ; and this glori- 
ous " predestination to the adoption of sons" in a new and 
sinless Adam, is a predestination of all your "infants of 
a span long" to salvation, from which they can only fall 
as a fruitless branch may wither from its vine. Light 
breaks on my path! Away with your cold and freezing 
dogmas ! 

Dr. Alexander, of Princeton, in a work already quoted, re- 
marks that the simple reason for believing that all baptized 
infants are not born again, is, that they give no evidence 
of such regeneration. I confess 1;hat my own observations in 
life lead me to a very different conclusion. I find no such 
" fruits of the Spirit" in adult years, as I see in new-born 
babes. Such things, in babes " totally depraved" and with- 
out renovating grace, could never have been ! They are soon 
made gentle and meek and generous, readily forgiving and 
presently forgetting, reposing on your word, not filled with 
envy, and evil-speaking and suspicion, and unbelief and jeal- 
ousy and selfishness, as your grown-up regenerated men are : 
and all this, in a great degree, before instruction; proving 
" the foye-principle" to precede the principle of knowledge and 
faith. Treat your " regenerated" men, as you treat these 
babes in Christ; tell them they are not regenerated; keep 
them from the sacraments, because their 'selfishness, and 
skepticism, and doubts, and avarice, and heart-burnings, 
prove them " totally depraved :" and mark in them the result 
of that terrible experiment you make upon your children, 
teaching the little ones that they are the children of the devil, 
born to sin in the first Adam, and not born again to grace in 
the second ! No, Sirs ! You cannot find the child that gives 
no sign of spiritual life, or the baptized and trained child that 
does not give those signs affectingly and delightfully. See 



PEACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



487 



its little eyes bathed as you tell it of the Child in the manger ! 
See its little heart swell and break, as you tell it the story 
of the Cross ! See how it sleeps in perfect faith in the keep- 
ing of its God ! See how it sorrows when you tell it, it has 
wounded its Lord ! See how it forgives, and asks its play- 
mates to forgive ! Not regenerated % What, Sirs, can you 
mean 1 See your regenerated man in his experience-meeting, 
vaunting his recent gorgeous conversion! He "does not 
care any more what man can do or say ; he could lie 
down and let the world tread on him; he is born again:" 
but do that man an injury, and put him to the trial ! He 
"has parted joyfully with all for Christ, and grieves that 
he has not a thousand worlds to devote to the service of his 
Lord :" 'go, ask that man to part with one poor shilling for 
an orphan passing by, and put his vaunted love to its proper 
test J* 

But now, do our little baptized child a wrong : does his 
momentary passion settle into sullenness and hate ? Bring 
to him your little crape-covered orphan, or tell him that that 
orphan's mother is in yonder cottage, pale with hunger and 
want : and he will put into that orphan's hand the last far- 

* The orphan may still want for bread, but your " regenerated" soul will sing 
above the rest,at the next high-wrought meeting : 

" How happy are they, 

Who the Saviour obey, 
And have laid up their treasure above ! 

What tongue can express 

The sweet comfort and peace 
Of a soul in its earliest love ! 

" I rode on the sky 

Freely justified, I, 
Nor did envy Elijah his seat ! 

My soul mounted higher 

In a chariot of fire, 
And the moon it was under my feet." 



488 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



thing he has on earth !* No, no ! it is the teaching and example 
of Sectarism that smothers the love-born evidences of regen- 
eration in your children. You have another reason for believ- 
ing they are not regenerated. You hold that a child once 
"regenerated" can never "fall from grace 1 ' — a reason that of 
course has no weight with us — and we fall back, and invite 
the world to fall back with us, upon the Mother-hearted boun- 
ties of the Catholic religion. 

As little could I say that I was satisfied with the Calvinisti 
mode of teaching doctrines that are true. The Trinity is s 
held as to sever the sympathies and interests of the Fathe 
and the Son ; the Father exacting the utmost farthing fro 
the Son ; the Son in turn claiming the purchase of His blood 
the Spirit acting independently and separately from the lif! 
imparting Flesh of Christ, and a boon earned after all, by dint 
of suffering : all tending to drive the popular mind to Trithe- 
ism or to alienate it into Unitarianism. The Atonement, too, 
is preached entirely apart from our incorporation with Christ 
and His assumption of our common Flesh, as a naked, stern, 
commercial, quid pro quo transaction, that has driven all New 
England, and whole communities on the continent of Europe, 
into a denial of the mediation. The Spirit's influences, too, 
instead of being preached as a " quickening Spirit" passing 
over from perfected Humanity in the second Adam into all 
his children, are distinguished into "common" and "special," 
the latter for the elect, the former for the commoners of the 
human race ; imputing to the Divine mind a " respect of per- 
sons," and together with the semi-miraculous, transubstantia- 

* Lines that your u regenerated" man has never learned, are already graven on 
his little heart : 

"The Scripture saith, the poor and sad 
Are types of God the Son, 
And he who makes their hosoms glad, 
Makes glad the Holy One !" 



PEACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



489 



ting descent in "regeneration," fretting the world into a 
denial of the precious mystery. 

So with Kepentance. Instead of an enlightened, earnest, 
life-long sorrow — weeping, not to obtain forgiveness, hut 
rather, with Mary at His feet, because we are forgiven — 
Sectarian teaching has produced the wide-spread impression, 
that Kepentance is a feeling worked up to a high pitch, per- 
haps, at some animated meeting ; succeeded, in the same 
hour it may be, by peace or transport : whereby the world 
now understands that the penitent is, in a perverted sense, " the 
Lord's free man," enjoying too often a "liberty" to do what 
the world's veriest slave would feel to be disreputable. Who 
ever sees these sudden bursts of penitence making a man 
sorry, as a baptized child is sorry, for the injuries he has done 
or is doing to his neighbors 1 Who has ever known the sins 
of the tongue to be retracted by one of these glowing conver- 
sionists ? Is not the spiritual pride it generates an absolute 
barrier to the possibility of retraction and reparation : although 
these are essential parts of repentance as the Catholic religion 
teaches it"? A sudden burst of sorrow ; a lightning-flash of 
joy ; and the repentance is done : and is all the more genu- 
ine for the suddenness of its coming, the shortness of its stay, 
and the abruptness of its departure. In the days of Bunyan 
and Baxter and Flavel, these two experiences, which have 
always gone by odd names, were denominated "law work" 
and "grace work." In those days, the Pilgrim was kept in 
terror under the overhanging mountain for three or four or 
five long years, before he was admitted to the " grace work" 
of finding " peace and joy in believing :" but in these times 
of speed and steam and electricity, the motions of the Spirit 
are so concentrated and controlled, that a single " meeting" is 
quite sufficient to " get through" the experiences both of " con- 
viction" and "conversion;" the worst man living performing 



490 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUEOH. 



the life-long offices of penitence and satisfaction to the wronged, 
in the ebullitions of an hour ! 

So likewise with Faith. Calvinism, I know, does not in 
theory, but I as well know that it does in practice and effect, 
separate and put asunder the works and the faith that God 
hath joined together. One might suppose that every doctrine 
of Christianity was faith ; that every precept of the law was 
faith; that every fruit of the Spirit was faith; that every 
duty toward God or man was faith ; that every virtue to fit 
us for the skies was faith : whereas it is, like repentance, but 
one of " the first principles of the doctrine of Christ," from 
which we are to " go on unto perfection." Revivalism begins 
and ends too much with faith. I never knew the " pure and 
undefiled" Eevival that clothed the naked or fed the orphan. 
The Catholic religion saith, add to your faith, virtue; and to 
virtue, knowledge ; and to knowledge, temperance ; and to 
temperance, patience ; and to patience, godliness ; and to god- 
liness, brotherly kin,dness ; and to brotherly kindness, charity. 
This is the pyramid of virtues by which, if we successfully 
erect it, we " make our calling and election sure," and shall 
be able easily and certainly, to climb to heaven. The foun- 
dation is Jesus Christ : to faith is assigned the honorable 
task of finding the foundation, and laying on it the first stone 
cemented in the tear of repentance. Yet this is the bare 
beginning. '•''Add to your faith, virtue;" and so on up to 
" charity," the highest grace we can attain on earth, the be- 
ginning of all graces in heaven. Not only is such a super- 
structure a safe path to heaven, but it is a house of light and 
a beacon of love to a rational world. As Christianity is not 
a one-idea, but is, in this respect, a science in which no one 
idea stands alone, but each is a link in an endless chain, reach- 
ing from first truths up to boundless demonstrations : so prac- 
tical religion is also a holy chain ; link fastened to link, Christ 
to faith, faith to hope, hope to charity, charity to holiness, 



PEACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



491 



holiness to heaven, and heaven to Christ again, in God. They 
who see nothing else but repentance and faith in the Bible, cut 
the celestial chain that reaches from this dark world to heav- 
en, By this chain — of which Christ crucified is the earthly 
anchorage, and Christ glorified the heavenly, with the long 
series of virtues and graces glittering between — we are to be 
drawn to God. No single separate link will raise us to the 
heavens. Together the bright and polished parts must stand : 
or, let but one be missing, and the whole must fall. To the 
faith that exalts Christ, we subscribe with a thousand hearts : 
but the faith that exalts faith, and makes faith, or an inward 
experience, its " all in all," we cast to the moles and to the 
bats. When we see this vaunted " faith" powerless to heal 
throughout whole neighborhoods " bitter envying and strife," 
mutual " biting and backbiting," unwearied " tattlings" and 
" evil surmisings ;" when we see the tongue " a fire, a world 
of iniquity, setting on fire the course of nature, and itself set 
on fire of hell," an "untamed serpent" creeping along its 
slimy path from house to house, a " deadly poison" pouring 
"blessing and cursing out of the same mouth;" when we see 
" the fatherless and widows in their affliction" neglected and 
unrelieved: we remember that it is written, "The devils 
believe" — and are devils still ! When we see whole commu- 
nities acting virtually on the advice of Luther, Peccate for- 
titer ; credite fortius — " Sin hard ; but believe the harder" — 

" Backing their pious sabbaths, so to speak, 
Against the wicked remnant of the week ;" 

when we see the thronging multitudes about us, however 
worldly or profane, professing a reliance on Christ, and, on 
the death-bed, working themselves up with the utmost ease 
to the established minimum of a sudden repentance and 
" casting of themselves on Christ ;" when we see vast num- 
bers of the ignorant, on the old and easy advice, Crede quod 



492 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



habes, et habes — " Believe that you have, and you have it" — 
putting their faith in an inward feeling rather than in the 
Lord of life : the Catholic religion lifts up her earnest voice, 
and cries, " Though I have all faith, so that I could remove 
mountains, and have not CHARITY, I am become as sound- 
ing brass, or a tinkling cymbal." " Faith without works 
is dead," it cries, a subtle and soul-murdering imposture ! A 
man " may say he hath faith and hath not works :" the Cath- 
olic religion does not hesitate to raise the awful question of 
her fearless Apostle, " Can faith save him?" 

My own conviction, after long and painful attention to the 
facts, is, that the manner of preaching the great doctrine of 
justification by faith, isolating it from the virtues, and making 
it a reflexive operation, terminating in a feeling rather than in 
Life from Christ, is, among sectarians especially, the soul -de- 
stroying heresy of the age. The world without know that 
they have already this minimum in some degree ; and they 
see daily before their eyes the dying, without difficulty accept- 
ing the terms of sectarianism, and "casting themselves on 
Christ." I was once called, at the break of day, to see a 
youth whom I knew to be wild and profane, and perhaps in- 
temperate. He had sent for me. I had seen him the even- 
ing before, in vigorous health. Already had disease half done 
its work. I saw his youthful form writhing in pain ; but the 
miseries of his mind were greater. When I first came to him, 
between his paroxysms, he was earnestly exhorting several 
young men around him to " take warning from his fate." He 
was in an agony. It was despair ! Now was the hour he 
should have rested from his pilgrimage ; instead of which, 
his pilgrim's course was now to be begun. This was the hour 
when he should • have laid the last stone with shoutings on 
the building ; instead of which, he was to cast about for a 
foundation. Unfit for the awful blessedness of heaven, its 
transparent truth, its deep-toned worship, its generous love, 



PRACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



493 



its every word and work and look and thought and feeling, 
pure and unsullied and transparent as its crystal streams, a 
world unclouded by a passion, unpoisoned by a whisper, un- 
sullied by a sin : and now the work of a life-time was to be 
begun and finished in a hurried and stormy hour ! Earnestly 
as the ebbing moments would allow, I pointed him to " the 
Man" that was to be " the hiding-place from the tempest." 
Presently a reaction came, as striking as the collapse in his 
disease ; and exhibiting all the phenomena of the revivalism 
I had seen in other days. He was calm ; he believed ; his 
sins were forgiven ; his heart was glad. The bystanders were 
overjoyed ; and I myself had had " hope in his death." Al- 
though I had seen stimulants and opiates largely administered 
before my eyes, it never occurred to me that they might have 
performed a part in producing the phenomena ; until the at- 
tending physician told me, a few days afterwards, that the 
patient had died of delirium tremens ! It then occurred to me, 
that I had often before remarked these sudden emotions of 
religious terror, penitence, and joy, to be more easily and 
more strikingly produced in persons addicted to intemper- 
ance, than in any other class of men. Let me not be under- 
stood as passing judgment upon this young man : it is not 
for me " to judge another man's servant." I have adduced the 
case because it has occurred within a few weeks, and is an il- 
lustration of my invariable experience of the perfect ease with 
which you may induce the dying to " cast the soul on Christ," 
and die, as the phrase is, "resigned!" A life of profanity, 
uncleanness, drunkenness, and debauchery, rewarded at its 
close with peace, joy, ecstasy ! It is the great phenomenon of 
revivalism — Crede quod kabes, et habes ! But, in naked truth, 
it is a fearful thing, this mistaking the decay of expiring nature 
for the subjugation of the flesh ; the ejaculations of pain for 
the language of prayer ; the languor of disease for the peace 
of resignation ; the agitations of guilt for the emotions of a 

42 



494 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



true contrition ; the throbbings of the undying conscience for 
the pulsations of a living heart : the triumphs of disease for 
the victories of grace ; the repentance of a Judas for the tears 
of a Mary ; the prayer of a Simon Magus for the Nunc dimit- 
tis of a Simeon : this is falling into the delusion so loudly 
condemned in others, of a sudden and hurried conversion; 
and. like the blinded papist, glossing the disorders of a whole 
life with the extreme unction of the dying hour ; or, like the 
victims of the ancient Flood, clinging in the wild storm to the 
outside of the Ark, flying to the Sacraments and externals of 
the faith ! O frightful task, to offer to God the miserable 
leavings of a misspent life ; the gleanings of a vintage pressed 
into the cup of pleasure ; a victim taken from the fold for 
heaven, when, no longer fit for the world's use, its limbs are 
palpitating in the jaws of death ! In the Papist, who believes 
there is another period in which to carry forward the work 
begun anywhere this side the grave, all this is reasonable : 
but that we are thus to be ushered directly from the body 
into heaven — unprepared, uncongenial in habit, character, or 
temper for its unsullied purities — : how can a true Protestant 
believe ] And why are millions in our land procrastinating 
repentance to the dying hour, except that they are taught that 
a short prayer-meeting or a short half-hour is more than 
enough for all the essential acts of repentance and of faith? 
No, no ! As at the charming of the lyre of Amphion the 
stones are said t§ have risen into their places in the walls of 
Thebes : so a true faith, chiming with the music of a good 
conscience, will gather all the other virtues to itself in the 
spiritual building. " The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temper- 
ance." " Add to your faith virtue, knowledge, temperance, 
patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, charity." Faith is but 
a single grape upon the cluster. Indeed, it is not so much a 
fruit, as it is the active, circulating junction of the branch with 



PEACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



495 



the heavenly Vine, of which the evidence will be its grapes 
hanging in rich clusters over it ; and who can doubt that a 
branch bringing forth such fruits, ripening and mellowing 
until fit for angel's food, shall be gathered into the heavenly- 
Paradise 1 Faith is but a single star in a single constellation 
in the firmament of grace, 

" Each, all proclaiming as they shine, 
The hand that made us is divine." 

Why will you darken the radiant firmament, destined to glow 
and burn and brighten when the powers of heaven shall be 
shaken : and leave in human sight but the lone, cold star of 
faith., which, like the stars above us, is to fall and die 1 No ! . 
We express our firm conviction once more, that the doctrine 
of justification by faith is understood by the people generally 
to mean, what none but the Antinomian would desire to 
teach : in a word, that, as it is too often preached, especially 
among sectarians, it is ad clerum, or, in the theological sense, 
true ; but ad populum, or in the popular apprehension, false. 
Here is one great secret, we fear, of our worldliness, our 
avarice, our starving missionaries, our stinted charities, our 
unprovided poor, our miserable broils, our gossiping, our 
vindictive, unforgiving tempers. They are all covered by the 
imputed but not corrected by the indwelling righteousness of 
Christ ; all smoothed over and " justified by faith :" — a dung- 
hill wrapped in snow, and presented as a pure offering to 
God! 

But tell us not that we undervalue faith. We magnify it. 
We restore it to its ancient honors. We replace it in its an- 
cient crown, among the lost jewels of meekness, and brother- 
ly kindness, and truthfulness, and sincerity, and gentleness, 
and charity, and mutual forgiveness, and love. If Churchmen 
undervalue faith in the Eedeemer's blood, explain to me, I 
pray you, why we have so much at heart the Altar, the break- 



496 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



ing of bread, and the red cup of the awful Eucharist'? Why 
is it that we lift aloft on steeple high, and would keef> contin- 
ually before men's eyes, the Cross, the symbol of the world's 
redemption 1 ? It is because we know we cannot obtain that 
blessing until we be covered with the fleece of the slain Lamb. 
We fill the windows of our sanctuaries with the thorns, the 
scourge, the cross, the hammer, the nails, the spear, the lamb : 
because it is through these that the light of Heaven dawns 
on us. Amidst the wild skepticism which you create, and 
with which you must for ever struggle, it may be well for 
you to dwell day and night on " the first principles of the 
doctrine of Christ but with us, they are the alphabet of our 
religion, no longer open to discussion. We have learned and 
believed them long ago, and raise everywhere the Altar and 
the Cross as symbols of a hope already attained. Church- 
men undervaluing the " redemption by His Blood?" God 
forbid ! I will take you to the bedside of a Churchman, who, 
after a brief life of sorrow, perished not long ago at sea. 
" Do you place," said a Presbyterian minister to him, as he 
lay dying, "Do you place your sole reliance on the merits 
and righteousness of Jesus Christ for your salvation '?" The 
youth, fixing his eyes on those of the inquirer as if grieved 
at the question, said, " Of course I do !" The Presbyterian, 
to his credit be it said, has lately thought it worth while to 
relate the facts of the occasion in a Presbyterian journal, (the 
Lord reward him!) for the avowed purpose of doing justice 
before men to the memory of Arthur Carey, whom he 
learned to love. Take now another — the hated and murder- 
ed Laud. " Good people," said the hoary-headed Archbishop, 
as he stood upon the scaffold high, " this is an uncomfortable 
time to preach, yet I shall begin with a text of Scripture : 
i Let us run with patience ,' &c. — I have been long in my race, 
and how I have looked to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of 
my faith, He knoweth. I am now come to the end, and here 



PEACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



497 



I find the cross and a death of shame ; but the shame I must 
despise, or I shall not come to God. My feet, as you see, 
are on the brink of the Red Sea, an argument I hope that 
God is bringing me into the land of promise. I shall most 
willingly drink of this cup of the passover with its bitter 
herbs, as deep as He pleases, and enter into this sea, yea, and 
pass through it, in the way that He shall lead me." Then, 
having concluded his discourse, he knelt down on the scaffold 
and said, " O Eternal God and Merciful Father ! look down 
upon me in the riches and fulness of thy mercies, but not till 
Thou hast nailed my sins to the cross of Christ, not till Thou 
hast bathed me in the blood of Christ, not till I have hid my- 
self in the wounds of Christ." 

We do not, for all this, boast ourselves as " evangelical" 
above all others, or as having made some great discovery in 
religion. To the Catholic heart these are " the first princi- 
ples" which St. Paul exhorts us to learn, and then " leave, 
and go on unto perfection," — the perfecting of character in 
concert with the harmonies of the heavenly world. That a 
man is " justified by faith," is a most true and comfortable 
doctrine. But to fritter away this vast circle of truth into a 
mere belief in Christ as a Redeemer ; and this again into a 
trust in His atonement ; and this atonement again into a sat- 
isfaction to divine justice ; and this satisfaction, once more, 
into mere suffering ; and this faith itself concentrated into a 
single act of " casting the soul" upon this suffering for hope ; 
and Christ entirely unknown as the Second Adam, communi- 
cating from His body into ours a quickening and transform- 
ing life, purifying our flesh by the same agencies or operations 
that purified His : this is a mode of teaching which we must 
regard as unsafe and soul-ruinous in the highest degree. 

Calvinism, in my observation of its influences, generates 
moreover an exaggerated and morbid conception of every 
thing in true Christian experience. I need not go over the 

42* 



498 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



ground — dreams, voices, impressions that one is forgiven; 
lights, sensations, passionate and self-consuming bursts of 
feeling ; opening by accident to certain passages of Scripture ; 
a constant effort at the marvellous, the counterpart of the 
Papists' hankering after mongrel miracles ; a lifetime of la- 
borious, parental, and pastoral teaching, ungratefully cast 
aside as having accomplished nothing, until by some accident- 
al casting of the eye upon a passage of the Bible, or by some 
sermon of some passer-by, or some picked-up, half-torn leaf 
of a common tract, the mighty office of " regeneration" is per- 
formed ; men willing to be damned, if it be for God's glory, 
before they can be saved ; the prayers and charities of bap- 
tized but " unregenerated" men, an abomination to God : these 
and a thousand like things continually resulting from secta- 
rian teaching, and contrasting amazingly with the calm and 
solemn Faith and Hope of the ancient and true Religion. 

The sectarian pulpit partakes strangely of these exaggera- 
tions. What impressions, for example, are generally re- 
ceived from sectarian teaching, concerning the dying hour % 
I do not hesitate to say, One utterly at variance with the 
facts. The Christian — calm, collected, happy, triumphant 
when he comes to die : the sinner — anxious, agitated, terrifi- 
ed, and in despair ! It is not true : else the Book is not true, 
in which it is written of the wicked, " There are no bands in 
their death ; they are not in trouble as other men." A very 
extensive observation convinces me that good men are often 
more anxious than the wicked, when sick unto death ; and 
that the wicked who have never reflected on the awful nature 
of a true preparation for heaven, who have never tasted the 
bitterness of sin, whose " conscience is seared as with a hot 
iron," are the first and easiest to receive consolation at death, 
and suffer a far less, and a far less lasting concern for the re- 
sult. I have often made inquiries, on this subject, among 
medical men in the habit of observing such phenomena : and 



PRACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



499 



their observations have invariably corroborated my own. 
Nay, I have been admitted by them into the secret, in part, 
of the phenomenon which has too much surprised us — of that 
deplorable skepticism into which so many of the medical pro- 
fession, in this and the last age, have fallen. The Calvinistic 
pulpit has made a false issue with the profession. Gentlemen 
see that these death-bed stories are in general not true ; and 
that the " bad" man meets his fate often with the apathy and 
calmness of the " good :" or, if alarmed at all, can be as easi- 
ly and as soon reduced to the same condition of " resignation" 
or " peace," by physical means and causes, in which, as med- 
ical men, they cannot^ be deceived. And as religion is held 
to be only a bright transition from cloud to sunshine in feel- 
ing : they compare the phenomena of the death-bed with 
those of a revival or a camp-meeting ; and reduce the mighty 
paroxysm which "preaching" seeks to produce, to the same 
precise category with the effects of disease, and of a certain 
condition of the nervous nature. As to the rest, they daily 
see thousands dying without concern or fear, who have neg- 
lected religion all through life : and, seeing the pulpit contra- 
dicted continually by facts, they become skeptics themselves, 
and die in the apathy in which they have lived. One of the 
most saintly, heavenly men I ever knew — a Presbyterian 
missionary falling, in his youth, in the service of God — said, 
when he came to die : " Brother, it is an awful thing to die ; 
unspeakably awful to appear before God ! The best prepara- 
tion falls unutterably short !" And David could not under- 
stand the mystery of the happiness of the wicked, until he 
went into the Sanctuary. And St. Paul tells us of good men 
"who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to 
bondage." But if religion is reduced to a desultory act of 
casting one's self on Christ, and a consequent feeling of com- 
posure or peace, we must expect that misbelief will continue 
to blind, and procrastination to destroy the multitude. No ! 



500 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



We must cease this lullaby with which we have put the world 
to sleep ! We must let men know that preparation for heav- 
en is a task for which" the longest life is short ! And as they 
understand that gold does not drop on them from the clouds ; 
that crowns do not grow for them upon the trees ; that there 
is no such thing as acquisition without toil : so we must tell 
them ivhat that awful preparation is, that is to fit men, in body 
and soul for HEAVEN. 

I will speak now of but one thing more — the austerity 
of the Calvinistic system. Calvinism, like Popery, has its 
terms of accommodation for the multitude who, in less than 
" two moments," can be prepared for death : while, on the 
other hand, it has its pains and rigors for others, disposed 
to be austere. In this aspect of it, Calvinism wants the 
meekness, the gentleness, the atTectionateness of the Master. 
Oh, I have felt its cold repulses, and its distracting terrors, 
and its terrible tormentings, till endurance has been well 
nigh exhausted. I have felt the wheel, the rack, the torture ! 
When I was a little child, it spoke to me and said : a Perhaps 
you are not one of the elect ! Perhaps Christ did not die for 
you! The influences you feel are perhaps the 'common,' 
not the ' regenerating influences of the Spirit ! Your prayers 
being done in impenitence, are an ' abomination to the Lord !' 
You have no power ! If you have power, you have not the 
will! You must 'feel' thus and thus, or you cannot be 
saved! You can do nothing to save yourself!"* 

Oh, I have felt my bones cry out under the torture ! While 
yet a boy, I met with other boys in "prayer-meetings," to 
reach the solution of our terrors. Those boys, so far as I can 

A state of feeling reminding one of the pithy old distich : — 

" You can, and you can't ! 
You will, and you won't ! 
You shall, and you shan't ! 
Youll be lost if you do ! You'll be lost if you don't !" 



PEACTICAL TEACHINGS. 



501 



trace their histories, lived all, except one, to despise the cheat, 
and to doubt the reality of all religion : one has lived, not to 
despise, but to mourn; and to find, imthe glories of the an- 
cient faith, the magnificent image and superscription of its 
Author. In a small company of seven, at sea, not long ago, 
the subject of sectarian revivals being introduced, I found 
that four of that little number had been subjected in boyhood 
to the fearful process : and three or four were now, on the 
subject of religion, like our bark, entirely at sea. I meet 
the like phenomena frequently. Is this the " regeneration" 
that we hear of ? And I have now in my memory, as I have 
daily in my prayers, a dear one in this mortal life — how dear 
I cannot tell — dear as a brother. In boyhood and youth he 
was tossed up and down on the waves of revivalism : he is now 
laboring to beat back the billows of universal skepticism! 
Although he has glimpses, recently, of the Catholic religion 
flashing gorgeously upon his understanding : yet the habit of 
skepticism, generated by his old experiences, ever and anon 
suggests the thought that perhaps, after all, Christianity may 
have been some solitary effort of the natural mind, never 
made before, and not again to be repeated. Then comes the 
conviction, that it ought to be true ; it is too good to be 
false ! He trains his little ones in the ancient faith: not many 
besides himself have suspected the terrors of his troubled 
mind. He is himself devout — so devout that in the darkest 
hour, when he can say no more, he prays ; " O God, if thou 
art God, scatter the darkness, and let there be light within 
me !" Even beyond this point the harmonies of the ancient 
faith are the daily admiration of his soul : but Calvinism, 
with its iron rod, has dashed the harmonies of his own pure 
mind — the purest I have ever known on earth. Calvinism 
and revivalism he encountered in early youth : and horrid 
Atheism brooded darkly over his mind for years, until the ge- 
nial influence of a better faith began to dawn into it again ; 



502 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



which I feel assured will, by God's mercy, shine in him more 
and more unto the perfect day. My personal acquaintance 
embraces numbers of individuals led back, by a like experi- 
ence, to the ancient and happy fold : while the pall of skep- 
ticism yet hangs over communities in our own land, and over 
empires abroad, where Calvinism has run its course ; as we 
have already shown. O God, beat back the waves of such a 
system from thine ancient Church ! O Spirit of God, lift up 
against the flood, when it cometh in, Thy glorious Standard ! 

But again, like Popery, this system has its compromises. 
It offers an easy escape from the true and useful austerities of 
the Christian life. Instead of living severely, it teaches only 
to believe severely ; instead of writing bitter things against 
ourselves, to believe hard things concerning God ; instead of 
austerity of self-discipline, the austerity of doctrine ; instead 
harshness against failings of the tongue, the temper, and the 
flesh, it is too often satisfied with harshness of judgment on 
others. Instead of ascribing the straitness of the gate, and 
the way of life to its proper cause, in our lusts and passions : 
it would often make it the result of the arbitrary purposes of 
God. Instead of teaching that "few find it," because few 
seek it as they should : it teaches that few find it, because 
God hides it, save from His elect ! Thus, through the whole 
circle of truth, it is, with its multiform anathemas, a vast gi- 
gantic system frowning and scowling sullenly upon the sons 
of men. When will the cloud pass over which has kept the 
earth wet with men's tears 1 When will the Catholic reli- 
gion belt its dark bosom with the ancient mercies of God % 

We have yet another illustration, in the memoirs of Frank- 
lin, as written by himself; where we may see a gigantic 
mind wrestling awhile between Calvinism and infidelity, and 
seeking in the latter a refuge from the harshness of the for- 
mer ! He tells us of the severity of the dogmatic training 
to which he was subjected when a boy, and which prepared 



PRACTICAL TEACHINGS. 503 



him to resolve, with a young companion, to wear a long 
beard, subsist on a vegetable diet, and set up a new religion. 
Once, in his riper years, he listened with hope to a popular 
divine announcing for his text : "Whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, 
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, 
whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, 
if there be any praise, think on these things." But the ex- 
pectations of the philosopher were woefully blighted, when 
this magnificent passage was made to cover, seriatim, the 
coldest observances of the Calvinistic creed. The result is 
known. Franklin was disgusted. The philosopher became an 
infidel; and ascribes his infidelity to paternal training, and 
the popular ministerial preaching.* Over such a calamity, 
although but the type of millions, the mountains and hills 
might take up their lamentations. Yet men persist in the 
barren dogma — a dogma worn out in the fields where once it 
flourished, and now sought to be introduced into the virgin 
soil of the Church ! 

Calvin himself, it is said,f preached nineteen hundred ser- 
mons, of which the texts are all recorded, and (with one doubt- 
ful exception) not one of them is taken from the Gospels. 
Luther went so far as to declare that " the Gospel is not in 
the Gospels!" But the ancient Qhurch has had from the 
beginning, has now, and ever shall have, her " Gospel for the 
day." 

* As to the sermon alluded to, he says : "These might be all good things ; but 
as they were not the kind of good things I expected from that text, I despaired of 
ever meeting with them from any other, was disgusted, and attended his preach- 
ing no more." 

+ Dr. John Augustine Smith, of the medical faculty in New York, has stated 
the fact ; and I am not aware that it has been, or can be, contradicted. 



CHAPTER XXV. 



RAGS OF POPERY". 



A Presbyterian wag, on seeing, in an unfinished church, 
that some idler had written over the Altar, "I publish the 
banns of marriage between the Protestant Episcopal Church, 
and the Church of Eome :" took up the chalk and wrote be- 
neath, " I forbid the banns, as the parties are too near of kin." 
We enjoy this. We- laugh. It is wit, if it be not argument. 
It has the merit of good humor, if it have not the force of good 
logic. But when methods more deliberate are industriously 
resorted to, to bring down upon the Church a storm of popu- 
lar odium by the hue-and-cry of Popery — a cry that the Inde- 
pendents employ against the Presbyterians on account of 
" some mysterious virtue" going out from " the hands of the 
Presbytery ;" and the Baptists in their turn against the Inde- 
pendents, for holding the root of all abominations in infant 
baptism ; and the Quakers in their turn against all others, for 
still adhering to the externals of a ministry and sacraments 
at all — when a wild and blind cry like this is fondly resorted 
to, to eke out the deficiencies of argument : if it were not for 
the interests jeoparded, we could hardly regret the opportuni- 
ty, thus afforded, of seeing that Sectarians have in fact no eas- 
ier way of coping with the ancient Church, or silencing her 
claims, than by invoking the scorn and hooting of her foes. 

I have felt the influence of this cry. I abhorred Popery ; 



RAGS OF POPERY. 



505 



perhaps dreaded, more than I abhorred it. I had been taught, 
from a child, to " hate it with a perfect hatred." I spent a 
thousand hours in boyhood with an old copy of the " Book of 
Martyrs," copiously adorned with pictures intended to pro- 
duce, in an opposite direction, the effect of pictures in the wor- 
ship of the Papists : the former being designed to stir men's 
passions, the latter their devotions. While, with my little 
sisters and their playmates, we sat around the great volume, 
we kissed the wounds of the martyrs, and half worshipped 
their images ; we got us deadly instruments — pins, needles, 
knives, scissors, and without compunction put out the eyes 
of magistrates, and tore off the limbs and ears of Kings, 
Queens, Bishops, Cardinals, and Popes : while, at the top of 
each engraving, the picture of the Prince of Darkness with 
axes, torches, chains, and serpents issuing from his brain, suffer- 
ed indignities and mutilations showing, quite sufficiently, that 
we were not only disposed, unlike Saint Michael, to " bring a 
railing accusation," but would certainly have had the Evil 
One " tormented before his time." In fact, we were genuine 
little Protestants, that would have seen the Pope and all his 
followers at the bottom of the sea. And I was myself more 
than a full-grown Protestant, before I knew at all where Po- 
pery had struck at the foundations of the ancient faith, or at 
the unity of the ancient Church : .suspecting as little that it 
was done by additions to the primitive Creed, and by riding 
over the conservative Episcopacy, as that my own Church had 
done the same. 

What is Popery % Is it wafers 1 candles 1 crosses ? Lu- 
ther used wafers, candles, altars, crosses, crucifixes : and the 
Lutherans do still : was Luther a friend of Popery % Yet 
there are men who would play into the hands of Rome, by 
persuading the uninformed that the Reformation was a miser- 
able squabble about crosses, surplices, candlesticks, and snuff- 
ers ! No, Sirs ! It was for no children's quarrel that Luther 

43 



506 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



stood before the Diet at Worms, and Cranmer gave his body 
to be burned. It wag for doing precisely what you have all 
since done yourselves — for tampering with the ancient creed, 
for riding over the ancient order of the Church. With us, this 
is Popery. We know what it is. You know not what it is. 

In England you once, by act of Parliament, forbade pray- 
ers over the dead ; as they did also in Scotland and Geneva : 
and, in New England,* it is but fifty years since the first 
prayer at a funeral was heard. This rag of Popery you have 
now put on. 

Once you forbade chanting and choirs in your worship, 
both in Great Britain and America : but now one of your own 
ministers in Leeds has pointed the Psalms for chanting ; a 
chant from our own Daily Service with the Gloria Patri was 
recently sung to celebrate the landing of the Pilgrims ; and 
you have your choirs, in the classic phrase of a Puritan of bet- 
ter days, " bellowing the tenor like oxen, barking a counter- 
part like a kennel of dogs, roaring a treble like a sort of bulls, 
and grunting a bass like a number of hogs." 

Fifty years ago, or within half that time, you had not in 
all the land a single organ to distract your worship ; while in 
England "the devil's bagpipe," as- you called it, was formerly 
splintered and strewn upon the streets : but now its Babylo- 
nish tones fall pleasantly on your ears " at meeting," and you 
can endure quite well the bellowing of " the ten-horned 
Beast." 

Formerly, both in Old and New England, you held the 

gown and bands to be literally rags of" the harlot," and gown 

and surplice you put upon dumb beasts in England and stood 
m 

* On the occasion of the death of a Divine of the (Puritan) Establishment in 
Massachusetts, in 1685, although prayers at the funeral were by law prohibited, we 
find the following parliamentary record : " Voted, that some persons be appointed 
to look to the burning of the wine, and heating of the cider, against the time 
appointed for the funeral !" Expense £IB. Bought 32 gallons of wine, cider in 
proportion, and 104 pounds of sugar ! A regular Popish Irish wake. 



RAGS OF POPERY. 



507 



them at our altars : but now the model-Presbytery of New 
Brunswick have formally recommended the gown, (a recom- 
mendation, however, that created a little breeze, and was re- 
considered;) and the Dissenters in England have extensively 
introduced the gown, and some of them the white surplice ; 
although in general they adhere to black, the distinctive dress 
of the Jesuits. 

Once you denominated the Liturgy, the Church's " Leth- 
argy ;" and the Prayer Book, an "ill-mumbled mass-book," 
" belching the sour crudities of Popery" into your face ; you 
made bonfires of it in the streets, and forbade its use in En- 
gland; while the "possessed" young woman in the Rev. Cot- 
ton Mather's house, who was unable to read a syllable of the 
Bible, or a Puritan book, could read fluently, he tells us, the 
Episcopal Prayer Book, or any other Popish work whatever ; 
but now the more enlightened Dissenters in England often 
use it in their worship; and your own Doctors and Review- 
ers were passing the highest encomiums npon it, until you 
discovered that your laity were taking you at your word ; 
while even now your Barneses and Smiths and Winchesters 
and Springs and very best Divines, are engaged in the Po- 
pish work of writing and dictating prayers for others.* 

Once the symbol of redemption, on brow or church, chal- 
lenged the hootings of your armies in the field, and of your 

* It may be remembered that Drs. Anderson and Hawes, no mean names among 
New England Congregationalists, took open ground, in 1844, that Bishop Southgate 
was guilty of wilful misrepresentation in asserting that the Congregational mis- 
sionaries, in the East, had worn Episcopal robes and used the Prayer Book ; and 
in short had deceived the simple-minded Christians of the East, who believed 
them to be members of the English Church. The Bishop reasserts it. The Mis- 
sionaries are written to. Mark their answer to their "Board" in Boston! "By 
being ready, in accommodation to the great weakness of men, to use on special 

occasions our English gown, to use occasionally an Episcopal Liturgy : 

we have shown that we are immeasurably exalted above all the littleness of mere 
form and ceremony, and of that which is only external, and have exhibited a spirit 
of tolerance which was not previously supposed here to have any existence on 
earth .'" Suppose the Jesuits had done this, eh ? 



508 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



flocks at home; nay, your Divines and Diviners certified 
you that it was "the mark of the Beast:" but we see it now 
on Baptist and Unitarian temples, and glittering upon the 
bosoms of your children, and even speaking peace upon the 
sepulchral stone over your dead. 

To get away as far from Popery and heathenism as possi- 
ble, many of your ministers, in other days, refused to bap- 
tize by any name not found in Scripture, or not made other- 
wise appropriate by some act of Providence, or some pious 
personal experience ; so that the damsels and youth of New 
England are afflicted to this hour with such names as Expe- 
rience, Joy, Charity, Deliverance, Discipline, Piety, Mercy, 
Faith, Patience, Preservation, Devotion, Thankful, as also 
by all the nomenclature of the old Testament from Adam to 
Malachi ; while in England, according to Southey, the sons 
and daughters of the elect were called Earth, Dust, Ashes, 
Kill-sin, Joy-again, More-fruit, More-trial, From-above, Praise- 
God, Fight-the-good-fight-of- faith, &c, and one poor fellow, it 
is said, had the ill luck to be called, Through-much-tribula- 
tion-we-must-enter-into-the-kingdom-of-heaven. Now, how- 
ever, I believe the Puritans have overcome the scruple ; and 
a deteriorated conscience gives way to a cultivated taste. 

Once you were known as haters of Episcopacy by your 
dress, and gait, and rounded hair, and upturned eyes, and 
new-invented dialect, and " nasal twang" — with which New 
England is still afflicted as the " mark" of the Puritanism 
that once domineered over the land : but now, though in 
some instances the children of the parents that ate the sour 
grapes find their teeth still set on edge, and they cannot get 
rid of the " mark," yet I believe that all New England would 
be glad to cast off these tokens, which their forefathers adopt- 
ed to prevent the probability, of the Evil One's mistaking 
them for Papists. 

By solemn act of Parliament you once commanded all 



EAGS OF POPEEY. 



509 



paintings and pictures in the public collections, that contained 
representations of our Saviour or the Virgin, to be burned : 
but now we may see pictures of our Lord, and of his Saints, 
and of her whom " all nations shall call blessed," hanging in 
your galleries, and adorning your domiciles ; perhaps, with 
the Missionaries at Constantinople, to show that you have 
suddenly become " immeasurably exalted above mere exter- 
nals!" 

Once you detested " Sisters of Mercy and Charity" as 
daughters of " the mother of abominations :" but recently 
your more evangelical brethren in France and Germany 
have instituted like orders (in some cases under the scriptu- 
ral name of Deaconesses) in hospitals and parishes ; and are 
effectively proving (what it were devoutly to be desired 
that we all might learn) that our only plan at last must 
be, to take the good and true in Popery, to conquer the evil 
and the false. 

In those days you would not endure Daily Prayer and 
Weekly Sacraments^ and you still object to them if restored 
among us : but vast numbers of your own selves have risen 
up, under the names of Sandamanians, Christians, Disciples, 
Irvingites, &c, to the ancient and scriptural privilege of con- 
tinual communion ; while we have seen among you often the 
experiment of a daily "prayer meeting" which you have, 
however, as often been compelled to abandon, not a man 
among you being able to endure for three hundred and 
sixty-five successive days the infliction of extemporaneous 
prayers. 

Once by penal statutes, out of sheer abhorrence of Popery, 
you forbade any man or woman to be married by a minister, 
even of your own sect ; running as usual from the Popish to 
the Protestant extreme, making entirely secular what Papists 
had believed to be entirely sacramental : but now we do not 
know the Divine in all New England, in whose pocket a 

43* 



510 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



wedding fee would not repose as comfortably as on the con- 
science of an Episcopalian — one rag more of Popery. If 
we go on thus, we shall soon have you covered from head to 
foot! 

Once it was your loathing to see the lofty tower and pointed 
spire, the open roof and "dim religious light," the clustered 
column and symbolic tomb, as being so many expressions of 
Popery ; with axes and hammers you broke down the carved 
work of the sanctuary ; and it was one of your charges on 
the trial of the martyred Laud, that he had caused some 
painted windows at Lambeth to be mended : but now a man 
is famous among you according as he hath lifted up axes upon 
the thick trees, and wood, and stone, and all manner of ma- 
terial, to adorn with cunning device the place of your wor- 
ship, according to the pattern of the "Dark ages," so that 
they require but little emendation to make them once more 
" Christianity petrified."* 

I might trace this change that has come over you, into de- 
tails innumerable. If you will have it that the leprosy of 
Popery is in our skirts, we cite the proverb, Physician, heal 
thyself! Away with these organs and bells, these steeples 
and towers, these carved stones and Gothic temples, these 
chants and choirs, these gorgeous sepulchres, these prayers 
over the dead, these commendations of liturgies, and these 
books of printed prayers, (as if the Spirit could be bound,) 
these pictures of the Lord and of His saints, and these 
crosses, and the " Ave sanctissima^ now sung by your chil- 
dren to the piano and the harp ! Depend upon it, ye are 

* We confess ourselves at a loss to explain these strides of Presbyterianism to- 
ward the solemn and grand in architecture. We avow our motives : 1st, to make 
habitations worthy of the Being dwelling in them by His Presence ; and 2dly, to 
exhibit symbolically to all coming ages the mysteries of our faith and hope. We 
should like to know the motive of Sectarians— who profess that God is better pleas- 
ed with simplicity, and who have no mysteries to perpetuate— in resorting again 
to spires, towers, naves, &c. 



EAGS OF POPERY. 



511 



fallen, ye are fallen from the simplicity of your forefathers ; 
and if that be Popery which you once solemnly affirmed to 
be Popery, and with which you inflamed a nation to slay its 
Archbishop and its King : then your crusade against it is to 
be fought over again, and without a man left among you to 
fight it ! Like the sea, which comes back to swallow again 
the trash that it threw up and left in an hour of anger on the 
beach, you are yourselves returning to the " vile things" 
which you once spewed out of your mouth, from a nauseated 
and excited stomach. There is not a man among you that 
would now wish to shed the blood of either Laud or Charles ; 
and but few among you who would have deserted England's 
Church, if all the results of the experiment had been fore- 
seen. Why, even the Dutch have lately erected a church in 
New York in the form of the cross ; and the Board of Pub- 
lication of the Presbyterian General Assembly has ornament- 
ed the most beautiful edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress 
I have yet seen, with a magnificent frontispiece emblazoned 
with a gorgeous cross ! [For nine years, as a Presbyterian 
minister, I wore on my breast a cross presented by a friend 
in a Revival, and was never taken to task for so doing until 
I became an Episcopalian ; since when, first a carman whom 
I hired on the street, and then an organ-builder the first and 
last time I ever saw him, and after them, some half-dozen 
women, all " evangelical" Episcopalians, undertook to deprive 
me of my " liberty." * 

* This rude declamation of the organ-man came with a very ill grace from him, 
to be sure, and so I told him. " What," said I, " do you pretend to talk thus to 
me, when this desk of yours has on it no less than four Popish periodicals, (with 
crosses in them, too,) to corrupt your visitors who may be tempted to read them, 
as I have been while waiting your return to your office?" " Oh," said the organ- 
man, "I am obliged to take them in the way of my business, as it brings me cus- 
tomers and makes the pot bile" " So then it is for money '," said 1 5 " for money, 
that you make these noble instruments to chant the lauds of Mary and the saints ; 
but let me tell you, that though I wear the cross, and mean to wear it while I live, 
I would not for a universe of gold, encourage the circulation of those journals." 



512 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



But you allege that there have been apostasies from the 
Church to Popery ? I grant it. I lament it. But I can ac- 
count for it. As far as my information now extends, the 
facts will show that, for the most part, the apostates to Rome 
have previously belonged, either within or without the Church, 
TO THE PURITANS ; and have been, as Dr. Forbes (who 
was once one of them) expressed it with regard to himself, a 
"red-hot evangelical." Puritanism, within or without the 
Church, presents no fixed principle to the human mind, which 
is abandoned to the delirium of its own ' : private judgment," 
and by natural reaction, if not by the natural course of its own 
free-thinking, vaults from opinion to opinion, until it is lodged 
at last in the meshes of the Roman fisherman. Popery did not 
draw these men, but Puritanism drove them. They knew what 
had been everywhere the career and the goal of the Genevan 
sects ; they had been in the secrets of the so-called " evangel- 
icals :" they became dismayed at the thought that the Church 
was to run the course of the sects around her : and, in an 
hour of half-maddened grief, they rushed back from the pre- 
cipice over which the sects had slidden, to the embrace of 
Rome. It was Puritanism in the Church, combining with 
Puritanism, Popery, and Atheism without, that in 1833 abol- 
ished ten Bishoprics in Ireland at a blow ; and, instead of 
" Christian" education, substituted the present ' l National" 
system in Ireland, by which the Word of God has been taken 
from nearly half a million of children, and the children of the 
Church (as a bait to the Papists) have been allowed thereafter 
only such " Scripture Extracts" as the Papists shall approve. 
Gradually Maynooth, the hotbed of Popery, was endowed ; 
Romish Prelates were allowed precedence on public occasions, 

So leaving him to judge which of us was the Papist, I bade him good morning, and 
have never seen him since. 

I despised such cant as a Presbyterian ; I am quite sure Episcopalians cannot 
teach me to admire it. 



RAGS OF POPERY. 



513 



of those of the Church ; Romish Churches, Schools, Colleges, 
and Seminaries, in Canada and other colonies, were endowed 
with lands reserved for the Church : and all this, you will say- 
perhaps, under a High Church Premier and Government in 
England'? Not at all, dear reader. The first blow was 
struck in 1832, and the contest went on, under Lord Mel- 
bourne — not a High Churchman, but the " Liberal" Mel- 
bourne — who played a desperate game into the hands of the 
Jesuits, and had the so-called Evangelicals for his most po- 
tent allies ; and who is now, by many, supposed to have sold 
his conscience to the Jesuits while he was Premier of England, 
and to have died a Papist, and a Jesuit of the short robe ! 
The " High-Church party" remonstrated from the very first. 
But the " Evangelicals" and Puritans, within and without the 
Church, held the balance of power : and Popery understood 
how to make capital of the Latitudinarians. So I have re- 
minded the reader before, that there was not a Romish Bish- 
op or Priest, or a Romish separatist in England, until the 
very year the Puritans, calling themselves in that day " Gos- 
pellers," as they now do "Evangelicals," went out of the 
Church, and Rome entered through the breach. Please re- 
member this ! 

And what do we now see ? We see " evangelical" men, 
so-called, appealing from their Bishop to a secular court of 
Presbyterians and others, to settle great and grave questions 
of discipline and heresy ; leaning on the secular arm, and 
teaching the nation to look to the Queen as "the supreme 
Head of the Church." We see another Melbourne in Lord 
J. Russell, seeking to recognize the Pope as a Sovereign, and 
( to open direct diplomatic intercourse with Rome ; and, if we 
are to believe the intruding Bishops in England, intimating to 
the Pope that such a measure would not be resisted : and all 
this while he was forbidding the Church to hold even a Con- 
vocation of her clergy, promoting men of " liberal" senti- 



514 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



ments to all Episcopal vacancies, and himself procuring the 
baptism of his own child from a Presbyterian minister ; and, 
when he sees all England dismayed at the results of the Mel- 
bourne-Russell policy, and threatening to lay him in an igno- 
minious grave, joining the Evangelicals again in their cry 
against Church principles ! If the Jesuits have not made good 
use of the Puritans within as well as without the Church, 
then such a man as Loyola has never lived. 

What do we see ! The same combination in the British 
colonies at the north, in the British possessions at the south, 
and IN THE UNITED STATES— we see everywhere the 
same combination between the " evangelicals," so called, and 
the dissenter, the profane, the lawless, and the infidel — in ves- 
tries, in conventions, in parishes, in newspapers, in books, by 
raising tumults, by threatening the clergy, by direct persecu- 
tions and broils and mobs, per fas et nefas — resisting all re- 
turn to the principles of the Reformation, all return to the 
scriptural precedents of Prayers and Eucharists and Alms, 
and even avowing the determination, when they shall get the 
power, to alter and "reform" the Prayer Book of its "rem- 
nants of Popery !" 

My Brethren of the " evangelical school" within the Church, 
listen to me while I raise in your ears the cry of warning ! 
Abstain from your present work. Return to the principles 
you once embraced, and to which the party you despise are 
the true successors. Return to alms-deeds, and charities, and 
labors, and fastings, and eucharists, and prayers, and meek- 
ness, and gentleness, and love ! Return to the principles that 
made you the friends of the poor, and the poor the friends of 
the Church ; and fly from the teaching into which you have 
degenerated, and which has gathered around you the wealthy 
and the proud and the powerful, and has made the world with- 
out, regard you as essentially with them in their purpose to 
obliterate altar, priest, sacrifice, self-discipline, from the earth, 



EAGS OF POPERY. 



515 



together with the last vestige (unless it be looked for in 
Rome) of the cross and the keys. Once the wealthy and the 
worldling hated you ; now you agree. Brethren, stop ! My 
feet have trodden on the frightful precipice. My eyes have 
seen the dark and dismal gulf. My ears have heard the 
moans of the millions that have fallen over. And I tremble 
to see' you joining hands upon the precipice with parties just * 
hanging over, and they with others who are in the act of fall- 
ing, and they with the fallen ! What are you to gain ? If 
you fail of your object, your labor is lost ; and with it your 
time and opportunities. If you succeed, if the Church shall 
be Puritanized, if you even blot out Baptismal grace and the 
Eucharistic Presence from our Prayer Book : your league 
with the sects is complete, the link with antiquity is lost ; 
and, instead of here and there one, you will see thousands, 
tens of thousands, millions flying in dismay to Rome, and 
yourselves or your successors falling off to Socinianism ; and 
the meaning, we fear, of that awfully mysterious Scripture 
will be cleared up by a fulfilment which your own agency 
shall give it : " His deadly wound was healed. And all 
the world again wondered after the Beast!" 

There is one Presbyterian Church already, why do you 
want another % Nay, there are several hundred ; why an- 
other 1 Wait and see ! See first to what goal Presbyterian- 
ism is striding! Why, Brethren, since these pages were 
begun, all the " evangelical" associations of Connecticut have 
proven themselves powerless to censure the wretched doc- 
trines of their brother Bushnell, who assails their faith in the 
Holy Trinity as hitherto held, and their various views of the 
atonement, concerning which he tells them, that they all 
teach at last that " God must have his satisfaction somehow," 
and again " must somehow get his quantum of suffering out 
of His Son !" Brethren, let go their hands ! If you will 
hold on to theirs, you must let go ours. Let our Church be 



516 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



again what she was under Elizabeth — the noble Queen who 
(unlike Victoria) refused to be called " the supreme Head of 
the Church" — when our doctrines and our ritual had fair 
play : and there can be again, as there was then, no danger ! 
It was the exiles under Mary, returning from the Continent, 
that first rent the Church with the Genevan doctrines. While 
the Church was one, she conquered the strongholds of 
Popery, and she can do it again. She has kept off the 
malaria of infidelity from England, and she can do it here ! 
She stands with open arms to receive the thousands and ten 
thousands tnat, except for her, would have no other home to 
flee unto from the apostate sects, but to the bosom of Rome ! 
Puritanize the Church, and Rome's work is done ! 



CHAPTER XXVI. 



THE TWIN SISTEES. 



The political world presents at this moment a painful illus- 
tration of the maxim, that " Extremes meet." The feeling 
at the North against involuntary servitude, carrying men's 
minds in one direction; and the settled conviction at the 
South, that the circumstances of the case make such servitude 
both lawful and humane, operating in another : have produced, 
under our eyes, the one result of trampling under foot the 
wholesome compromises of the Union. In like manner Po- 
pery, by pressing its pretensions in one way, and Presbytery, 
by doing the same in the opposite direction, agree only in the 
common result of disregarding the ancient compact under 
which the Church was One, at the beginning : while the Epis- 
copal Church, adhering still to the sacred terms of that origi- 
nal Bond, holds both the extremes in check, and invites all, 
who profess and call themselves Christians, back to the basis 
of the Ancient Union, for which the noble army of Martyrs 
fell gloriously in the field. If the page were sufficiently wide 
I should exhibit in parallel columns the two extremes, and 
between them the Church of our love crucified, as between 
the two — bearing alike the taunts of both, and yet ever hold- 
ing forth the Lord, the Eaith, the Baptism of Antiquity. 

Popery affirms that the Church Presbytery ( or old Calvinism) 
of Rome, or, as some say, the Pope teaches that every man of the elect 

44 



518 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



is individually infallible in things 
essential to salvation, and can 
never deny his Lord ; and out- 
popes the Pope in insisting that.no 
man, once a Christian, can be ever 
left to depart this life in any griev- 
ous sin. 

The true Catholic believes that an individual, or even a par- 
ticular Church, may fall for ever away : and that it is only 
the Church in its totality that cannot fall from the faith, or 
yield to the gates of hell. 



himself, (which, now that Mary is 
deified, will probably be the nest 
article foisted into their creed,) 
is infallible in doctrine, although 
either he or his may fall into 
sin and perish. 



Popery refuses to be governed 
by antiquity ; alleging that the 
Pope and his underlings are capa- 
ble of defining and discovering 
truths that the times were not ripe 
for in the days of St. Paul. 



Presbytery refuses to be govern- 
ed by antiquity ; alleging that 
every man is capable of interpret- 
ing for himself: and whole sects 
of Presbyterians are, even now, dis- 
covering new doctrines for which 
they imagine the less enlightened 
ages were not prepared. 

While these Twin Sisters, Trent and Geneva — born, as we 
said before, in the throes of the fifteenth century — refuse to 
have their legitimacy tested by calling into court the ancient 
Mother : the true Catholic flies to her arms, and appeals con- 
fidently to her testimony, that the Church, — as he holds it in 
the Creed, and the Episcopacy, — is the Church that was born 
in the throes of Calvary. 



Popery, without remorse, adds 
to the ancient Creed her incongru- 
ous dogmas concerning relics, and 
dead men's bones, and purgatorial 
fires, and — in short, the decrees of 
the Tridentine Synod. 



Presbytery has also, without 
compunction, added to the ancient 
Creed, or substituted for it, the 
dogmas of predestination, limited 
redemption, and — in short, the res- 
olutions of the Synod of Westmin- 
ster. 

Episcopacy maintains the ancient Creed intact, as the an- 
cient compact and sacred bond of union : and would no more 
presume to add to that sacred instrument, or to take from it, 



THE TWIN SISTERS. 



519 



than she would alter or mutilate the Scriptures. You may 
see her agitated to her centre, but in her rashest hours she 
has never tampered with the Creed. 

The Papists, with unhallowed 
hand, have touched the ark of the 
Testament : and, as late as the fif- 
teenth century, have added to the 
Holy Scripture the Apocrypha as 
of equal inspiration and authority. 



Sectarians, from Luther to the 
" evangelical" Meander, have cast 
out one and another and another 
of the Books of Scripture, until all 
in their turn have been rejected: 
while some have added the words 
of Swedenborg, and others the 
Book of Mormon, and others the 
Revelations of Davis, and others 
the ethereal ravings of Madame 
Hauffe, the seeress of Wittemberg, 
whose " spirit-nerve" and " illumi- 
nated eye," and " epigastric ghost- 
seeing" and " language of spirits," 
are esteemed by many of the sa- 
vans of that place, as more enti- 
tled to philosophical belief than 
the Bible, which Luther has been, 
poetically enough, represented as 
exhuming from its monastic sepul- 
chre, in that very city. 

Only the Episcopal Church, with her Northern and Oriental 
sisters, has kept, and will ever keep, the ancient Word of 
God intact. 



Popery fetters "private judg- 
ment" by binding it down to in- 
sufferable trifles in the dogmas of 
Trent, each one of which must be 
received on pain of damnation. 



Presbytery leaves also little 
room for the free exercise of " pri- 
vate judgment," by the multitudi- 
nous dogmas required of her min- 
isters to be subscribed, as essential 
portions of a consistent system. 

Episcopacy, still content with the articles of the most 
brief and ancient Creed, leaves mankind free to differ on other 
questions, for the sake of promoting the chances of agreement 
and of peace in those matters which are alone essential. 



520 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



Popery is still employed in 
tinkering at the faith, and has 
lately added, or is about to add, 
the dogma of the Immaculate 
Conception of the Blessed Virgin, 
with which it appears all parts of 
the Romish Church have been 
simultaneously inspired. 



Sectarianism likewise is yet oc- 
cupied with mending her creeds ; 
and new and startling dogmas, 
often based also on alleged inspi- 
ration, are so often propounded, 
that both the novelty and the 
enormity have ceased to create 
surprise. 

The Episcopal Church has no such work to do, and never 
had : but has received her faith, as she has received her Bible 
and her Priesthood, complete from a pure and inspired anti- 
quity. 



Popery rides over the Bishops, 
as being in the way of the su- 
premacy of the Pope. 



Sectarianism rides over the 
Bishops, as being in the way of 
the supremacy of the pastor. 

The follower of the ancient Church insists that the pastors 
should bear themselves meekly, and set their flocks a heav- 
enly example by showing docility and obedience to their 
pastors. It is a discipline for the clergy, but it fits for the 
kingdom of heaven. 



Popery destroys the nature of a 
sacrament, (which, to be a sacra- 
ment, must have both an outward 
and an inward part,) by denying 
that, after consecration, the out- 
ward elements of the bread and 



Presbytery destroys the nature 
of a sacrament, by denying that, 
after consecration, the outward 
elements have an inward part, or 
convey to the soul the Body and 
Blood of the Lord. 



wine remain. 



True Catholicity adheres to the ancient definition of 
sacrament, and retains both the outward or visible, and th 
inward or invisible : alleging that the bread and wine ar 
still bread and wine, but that the Body and Blood of th 
Lord are conveyed through them, to our condemnation or 
glory. 

In a way we have explained Presbytery gives to the cheated 
before, Popery avowedly gives a infant a blank baptism, signifying 



THE TWIN" SISTERS. 



521 



blank communion, an unconsecra- apparently as much as in an adult, 
ted wafer, without the inward but conveying nothing but cold 
part or thing signified. and soulless water to the fore- 

head, without the inward part or 
thing signified. 

The ancient Catholic holds that Baptism with water only, is 
not Baptism ; and that when we baptize with water, if there 
be no resistance, (and in infants there can be none,) God, ac- 
cording to the promises of His word, does baptize with the 
Holy Ghost : and that a blank or white baptism is as solemn 
trifling as a "white communion." 

Popery denies the intermediate Presbytery, with the exception 

state betwixt death and the juclg- of a few Divines, denies the doc- 

ment : and was the first to allege trine of the intei'mediate state : al- 

that those dying in mortal sin go leging, with Popery, that the 

instantly to Gehenna after death ; good and the bad go immediately 

and the good instantly, or very to heaven or Gehenna. 
shortly after death, to heaven. 

Episcopacy maintains the ancient faith, that there is a 
place of repose for the good,* and of awful forebodings to the 

*The rich man was not in hell proper, but in "Hades;" Lazarus not in heaven, 
but in " Abraham's bosom ;" the penitent thief not in heaven proper, but in 
"Paradise," for our Blessed Lord had "not yet ascended" into heaven: even 
David was yet in that intermediate world, when St. Peter preached on the day of 
Pentecost. Read attentively St. Peter's sermon; "Death and hell" — not Gehenna, 
but Hades—" were cast into the lake of fire." So throughout. It were strange 
indeed to be rewarded or punished first, and judged afterwards ! No ! Let wheat 
and tares ripen fully until the harvest, which is "the end of the world." I was 
never more fairly disconcerted and non-plus sed in my life, than I was the very year 
that I left Princeton, by a half-intoxicated man at a country inn. " Mister !" said 
the man, " they say you are a parson ; now there is one thing I should like very 
much to know, and I suppose you are the man can tell me !" " Yes, sir," said I, 
"with much pleasure, if I can." "Well," said my new acquaintance, "can you 
tell me where the wicked go when they die ?" I answered, according to the best 
of my knowledge at the time, " To Hell." " Well," said he, " isn't it said that 
they shall ' by no means come out thence until they have paid the uttermost far- 
thing?'" "Yes." " Well, do they come out on the day of judgment? And if 
they do, isn't it very strange that the wicked should be sent to hell first, and judged 
afterwards ?" What I could have answered, I do not know ; as what I did answer 
I do not remember. The eyes of several bystanders were by this time drawn to 

44* 



522 



LOOKIXG- FOE THE CHURCH. 



wicked, until the judgment ; and that even the devils are not 

to be " tormented before the time."' 

Popery well nigh abolishes, Puritanism has fifteen hundred 
among her followers, the fear of ministers in this land alone, that 
hell, by the doctrine of purgatory. hold the doctrine of a purgatorial 

process, and no hell hereafter. 

The Catholic religion, before Popery was, and in the East 
where Popery has never been, denies a purgatorial fire, as a 
most dangerous innovation on the ancient faith, and a great 
wrong to the Divine government : since it represents the 
punishments of the world to come as vindicive exactions ex- 
tending even to the good. 

Popery exaggerates faith to an Calvinism exaggerates faith to 
extent that is fearfully abused a degree which by easy abuse 
among its followers, who are lulls its followers into complete 
taught that all die safe, who die security, for when they come to 
believing what the Church be- die, whatever ha3 been the fife, 
lieves. they believe and trust only in 

Christ. 

The Catholic religion, while it makes faith the foundation, 
requires the superstructure of character, as obviously requisite 
for mingling with the pure and unsullied spirits of "just men 

made perfect." 

I could greatly extend this list of coincidences between 
Romanism and Presbyterianism, but time would fail me. 
And as they coincide in dogma at so many points, (including 
the famous doctrine of election first invented by Augustine,) 
so do the two systems meet in their practical workings, as 
we shall now discover. 



us : and I felt myself in such close quarters, that I wished my new acquaintance 
of the Socratic school had joined the tee-totallers before I met with him, or had 
found such cause to ask. in the words of Scripture, •• Who hath babbling ?" This 
incident turned my attention to the subject ; and. long before T was an Episcopa- 
lian. I believed, with a few others of my brethren, in the Intermediate State. With 
eternity before us, there is no occasion for precipitancy ; and the majesty of re- 
demption, and the importance of the issue, justify deliberation and delay. 



THE TWIN SISTERS. 



523 



If Presbytery has dared to talk of " elect infants," she has 
borrowed this horrid dogma from the Papists, whose doctors 
have often held the damnation of (unbaptized) children. 

If Presbyterianism has relied much on frames and feelings 
and transports in religion, as an evidence of saintship, she has 
borrowed a leaf from Popery, which deals often in this same 
enthusiasm, and has lately done so in the raptures and rhap- 
sodies of the virgins of the Tyrol. 

If Papists say, as did Bishop England to a friend of mine, 
that they would not desire more than two hours to prepare 
any man for death : so Presbytery, by reducing preparation 
to a minimum, declares that faith and repentance may take 
place in a moment of time ; and I sat in the pulpit once, 
while a celebrated divine, in an elaborate treatise, sought to 
satisfy his hearers that it took no longer to prepare a man for 
heaven, than would be necessary for the two propositions to 
pass through his mind, " I have sinned," " Christ has died." 
He made it out less than a quarter of a minute. What mind 
can conceive the amazing mischief of such soul-deluding 
teaching ? With Bishop England it is reasonable, for he 
allows a place within the limits of probation for carrying for- 
ward a work begun here ; but the Calvinist translates to the 
unsullied light of heaven without any cultivation of char- 
acter ! 

If Papists too often substitute severity of dogma for sever- 
ity of morals : so Sectarism does away too often the rigor of 
a life-long charity, by the rigor of a sudden and harsh con- 
version ; the severity of fastings and prayers, by the severity 
of doctrines ; the discipline of brotherly kindness and forgive- 
ness, by the discipline of censoriousness and denunciation ; 
the severity of watching over self, by the severity of watch- 
ing over others : until, in some quarters, it has almost be- 
come a proverb, that a man is made a worse neighbor and a 
worse man by his " getting religion." 



524 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUECH. 



If Popery allows the taking of oaths with " mental reser- 
vations," "Evangelicalism" permits the same: and hence the 
Presbyterian Church has been overrun by a ministry sub- 
scribing the " Confession of faith," and then trampling it 
under foot and rending the ^communion ; and the Church of 
England has been cursed with the principles of the Tract No. 
XC, written by a man who had learned this lesson from the 
so-called " evangelicals." Yet he did no more as a Papist, 
than he had done before as a Puritan. Only as a High 
Churchman — high above all " mental reservations" of Puri- 
tan or Papist — could / have subscribed the Prayer Book, or 
have ever allowed myself to say, "We yield Thee hearty 
thanks most merciful Father, that it hath pleased Thee to re- 
generate this infant with thy Holy Spirit?' — a doctrine on 
which hangs all the after-teachings of the Church. 

If Popery has created schism in England to establish her 
supremacy: she waited until the Presbyterians had first 
separated from the Church, and set up altar against altar. 

If Popery has openly avowed that heretical princes must 
be set aside : Puritanism has avowed and carried out the 
atrocious doctrine in the murder of King Charles, who offered 
them a law of universal toleration — which was not the thing 
they toan fed. 

Popery excludes a large portion of the word of God from 
the sanctuary : Presbyterianism does the same, allowing 
almost universally but a chapter or two in a week, and in 
many European Presbyteries not even that, 

If Popery, reducing things to an accommodating mini- 
mum, has yielded to the fashionable phrase of going " to 
hear" Mass : so Presbytery has reduced the magnificence 
of worship to the lowest quantity of going "to hear" preach- 
ing. 

If Papists worship God by proxy of priests and choirs, as 
in many places they now do : Sectarians, excepting a few 



THE TWIN SISTEKS. 



525 



lines of rhyme said over by the people, commit their worship 
to their preacher. 

If Papists substitute certain outward abstinences for purity 
and piety : Sectarianism too, is often eminently satisfied 
with abstinences from what it calls the world — balls and 
dances, drinks and parties of amusement. 

If Popery has bound grievous burdens, and broken the 
unity of the Church by unheard-of terms of communion : 
Puritanism has been guilty too, in several thousand congre- 
gations, of compelling all who would receive communion to 
confess that they belong to a "Temperance" society, an 
Anti-slavery society, &c. 

If Papists have laid their hand upon the CUP and with- 
drawn it from the Laity, to make the doctrine of transub- 
stantiation consistent with itself : we are told that the Secta- 
rians have, in the State of New York alone, eight hundred 
congregations where the CUP that Christ commanded is for- 
bidden, and boiled raisin- water or other wretched drink is 
substituted ! As far as Sectarianism can do it, it is ripening 
the whole land for Popery. 

If Papists have a strange fancy for relics and dead men's 
bones: there may be seen, projecting from the tower of 
"The Church of the Pilgrims" in Brooklyn, a mammoth 
fragment of the Plymouth Rock, (they would have shuddered 
at a fragment from the rock of Calvary ;) and my own eyes 
have seen the chair in which "the Dairyman's Daughter" 
sickened and died, transported across the Atlantic, and held 
up as high as arms could reach in the Broadwa}^ Tabernacle, 
for the weeping gaze of " all the evangelical denominations." x 
Nay, I myself made a pilgrimage to her tomb in the charm- 
ing Isle of Wight, with a " guide-book" in my hand, saw a 
volume of names, (including, I observed, that of one of our 
own Bishops, who is zealous against altar-tombs,) and after 
inserting my own, plucked a sprig of the box tree, which her 



526 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



sainted hands had planted, and which I held for a time in as 
great veneration as the Papists in Rome are said to hold the 
tail of Balaam's ass.* 

If Popery has dealt much among the superstitious in 
dreams, voices, visions, smells, &c. : who does not know that 
among the ignorant, modern Revivalism has made large cap- 
ital of these same impostures, as evidences of the Spirit's de- 
scent into their hearts ? An extensive " awakening" was a 
few years since carried on among the negroes of Jamaica, in 
which they were required to dream three times on subjects 
assigned them, before they could be admitted to communion ; 
and the revival (as all " revivals " depend more on the music 
than the preaching) was greatly promoted by a solemn tune 
to " the house that Jack built."f Stop the music, and you 
kill any such " excitement" in a week ! 

If Popery has the faculty of adaptation so that its system 
sits easily upon her members, from the wild enthusiast to the 
most vicious and profane : so Sectarianism, in its multiplicity 
of forms and opinions, even to the denial of future punishment, 
has adapted itself completely to all sorts and conditions and 
opinions of men, from the fanatical revivalist and revelationist, 
to the cold Socinian and the German Pantheist. 

This parallel of abuses and corruptions, we might pursue 
almost without limit. J But, to sum up all, both systems — 

* " The keeper of the Wartburg" [Castle,] says M. D'Aubigne, " regularly points 
out to travellers the mark made [on the wall] by Luther's inkstand," which he 
threw at the " gigantic form of the devil, grinning triumphantly, and grinding his 
teeth at Luther, (who was engaged in translating the Bible,) tormenting and vexing 
him, and moving round and round him, like a lion ready to leap upon his prey." 
Very odd, certainly. We are told, on the authority of Luther himself,— a man of 
strong nerve, — that he very often saw and conversed with the devil! 

fThis account, by a Sectarian Missionary in that Island, I can well believe, after 
scenes and songs that I have seen and heard at the South, and in camp meetings, 
in our own country. Who has not noticed the similarity between Revival Hymns 
and the songs of the popular " Negro Minstrels ?" 

X And we might also say to a ridiculous extent. Let one example suffice for 
each. The Puritans tore down from the altar the commandments of God ; and posted 



THE TWIN SISTERS. 



527 



having broken away from the ancient uniformity of Creed, the 
ancient discipline of the Bishops, and the ancient terms of 
Communion, and refusing to abide by the verdict of antiquity — 
have substituted strange doctrines, a new discipline, and un- 
heard-of terms of communion. Both too have exaggerated 
truths into miserable fables. Popery exaggerates the inter- 
mediate state into a gross purgatorial fire ; the Real Presence 
in spirit and power in the Eucharist, into a carnal and local 
presence ; respect for the ashes of the dead who sleep in Jesus, 
into a veneration for their bones ; the indefectibility of the 
whole Church into the infallibility of the Roman; the Divinity 
of Christ, into a naked and absolute Divinity not now to be 
approached but by the mediation of Mary; the humanity of 
Christ, into a subjection to Mary whose maternal behests he 
must obey ; the purity of Mary into her " immaculate concep- 
tion," &c, &c. : while Puritanism pushes the Divinity of our 
Lord to the practical exclusion of his Humanity as a man like 
ourselves, whose life of prayers and fasts and sacraments and 
sufferings and charities we are bound to make our own; or 
else it presses His humanity to the denial of His Divinity ; it 
magnifies an overruling, into a predestinating Providence ; the 
election to privileges, into an irreversible election to salvation ; 
a watchful care of the people of God, into their nolens-volens 
"perseverance ;" the atonement itself, into a harsh, stern com- 
mercial transaction between what they style " parties in the 
Godhead ;" the gentle influences of the Spirit, into a sudden 
and irresistible ictus from above ; the divine method of patient- 

in their stead, in the Churches of England, the celebrated " Covenant ;" while a 
Popish saint, regularly canonized, travestied the Book of Psalms, and applied their 
majestic worship to the Virgin. The Papists too, have adapted our gorgeous 
Te Deum to the Virgin : as the Puritans did our Litany and Benedicite to their wars 
against their Church and King. The Papists have a set day at Rome, in which they 
gather and kneel around the Pope— their Grand Lama— on his throne, and kiss his 
toe : not long ago, the " Presbyterian" was compelled to take to task a congrega- 
tion for " singing to the praise and glory of" their Minister just returned from Eu- 
rope, a hymn of fulsome flattery to himself and his wife and children I 



528 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



ly wearing out evils and abuses, into violent, spasmodic in- 
discriminate eradication ; the utility of preaching, to the almost 
exclusion of worship ; and sins God can easily forgive, into the 
" unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost." I have seen a 
whole school of boys tortured on this last-named engine of 
revivalism, without a man to let us know that such a sin was, 
in us, well nigh impossible ! v 

Thus do extremes meet. Thus are Popery and Puritanism 
mysteriously united, by some tie through which they seem 
to act and think and feel together: not unlike the Siamese 
twins, that seem sometimes to be one, and sometimes two. 
How often have we seen Popery and Sectarism combining 
— together with Infidels, Agrarians, and selfish Politicians, 
and profligate and debauched men, against the Church : both 
in England and America — Popery as bitter as Puritanism, 
and Puritanism as violent as Popery. O Popery ! Popery ! 
It is of thy doing that the bewildered world is doomed to 
tread this maze of dogmas, before arriving at the ancient fixed 
goal of truth ! If thou hadst preserved the Creed intact, as the 
Churches of the East have done ; if thou hadst even been con- 
tent with thy ancient honors as Umpire in matters of local 
disagreement ; if thou hadst left the Scriptures untainted by 
the Apocrypha ; if thou hadst pinioned thy hand in the fear- 
ful hour that it was extended to rob the laity of the Cup ; if 
thou hadst bridled thy tongue when thou framedst it to pro- 
nounce anathemas against the word of God in the hands of 
the people ; if thou hadst stood fast by the ancient terms of 
communion in the early centuries; if thou hadst been as 
silent as the ancient fathers are, about the worship of Mary, 
and the angels, and the saints, and pictures, and images, and 
dead men's bones, and about purgatorial fires to satisfy justice, 
and about works of supererogation ; if thou hadst left volun- 
tary celibacy with the honors assigned it in Scripture and 
antiquity, and the celibacy of the clergy to the honorable 



THE TWIN SISTERS. 



529 



choice of pure and self-denying and heavenly-minded men, as 
it was left in the days of Jesus and of Paul ; if thou hadst been 
content that " all generations " should call Mary " Blessed j" 
if thou hadst taught the ancient doctrine of the glorious Pres- 
ence ; if thou hadst been satisfied that the whole Church should 
enjoy conjointly — but separately should forfeit — the promise 
of safe-keeping from the gates of hell ; if thou hadst not inter- 
polated the fathers ; in a word, if thou hadst adhered to 
antiquity : the world would have been spared these endless 
distractions, doubts, and protests. You have so mixed up the 
worship of Mary and the saints, with the worship of Jesus : 
that Sectarians by millions, without discriminating, have set 
the whole system down as an imposture, and denied the Lord 
who bought them with His blood ! You have so confused 
modern inventions and traditions with those of high antiquity 
and apostolic dignity, that unless men can see a dogma catego- 
rically set forth in Scripture, they reject it, and fill the world 
with the denial of infant baptism, and of other blessed and 
refreshing truths. Thou hast so perverted, too, the Episco- 
pacy into the Papacy, that men in disgust reject the one as 
the germ of the other. Thou has so mixed up "works of 
supererogation " and the merits of your " saints " and societies 
and your " Banks of Piety," with the merits of our Only Re- 
deemer: that the whole doctrine of justification by merits 
other than our own, is ruthlessly despised. And, in fine, thou 
hast so set thine own self-will and " private judgment " against 
all the doctrines, teachings, and usages of the Ancient Church, 
that every Sectarist, in breaking away from unity and from 
authority, pleads the example of the Pope ! Rome ! Rome ! 
Twin-sister to Geneva ! Is all the fanaticism, false doctrine, 
heresy and schism, bewildering and blighting the minds of 
men this hour, to be found in thy skirts % And thou Geneva — 
exalted to heaven, but thrust down to hell, for the denial of 
thy Lord — as thou art the child of Rome, art thou not the 

45 



530 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



Mother in thy turn, of this miserable brood of schisms, and 
strifes, and heresies, and horrid and blasphemous opinions, 
that darken and curse the sectarian world 1 " Come out of her, 
my people, that ye be not partakers of her plagues!" Drink 
not the cup that Rome and Geneva drink, lest ye be baptized 
with their baptism : but go to the pure fountains of Antiquity, 
the cool, clear, refreshing sources of an Ancient and Catholic 
religion. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 



VARIOUS OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 



It is singular how the whole outside world is fretted and 
worried with the family affairs of the Episcopal Church. The 
General Assembly of the Presbyterians may dispute, divide, 
go into the secular courts, fly into a hundred sects and schisms, 
and the Episcopalian not even know it. Baptists may hatch 
their brood of fifteen different communions : and the Episco- 
palian will still be calm and serene as a sunny day in June. 
All Germany may become infidel, or Scotland Arminian, or 
Ireland Arian, or Geneva Socinian, so far as regards the Pres- 
byterian population : and the Episcopalian will scarcely 
chronicle the fact. Eifty thousand sectaries may follow Joe 
Smith into the wilderness, or thousands of Presbyterian Prot- 
estants in Europe, terrified at the results of their experiment, 
may revert to Popery : and Episcopalians not notice it. But 
let there be an apostate to Popery from the ancient Church 
of God, east or west, north or south, in England or America : 
and all the sects are at once' thrown into dismay, and the cur- 
tains of the land do tremble. Newspapers, magazines, mobs, 
platforms, parliaments, echo the wild dismay. Is not this the 
leaven heaving the bosoms of the nations ? Is not this the 
Bride, startling the earth by the slightest imputation on her 
fair fame % Is not this the Church of God — the city that can- 
not be hid ? 



532 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



As an individual, unable to grapple with the defences of a 
Divine Episcopacy, I was glad to be diverted with the 
blemishes and weaknesses of its human administration. 
Any thing — to get rid of the interminable shower of argu- 
ments falling heavy and thick, like iron hail, around me. 

Thus, for example, I would fly across the waters, aDd re- 
new the political alliance of my forefathers with the Papists, 
and join in the outcry against the alleged exactions and op- 
pressions of the Episcopal Church. Nor did I care to be in- 
formed that the present Episcopal Church in Ireland is the 
true and lineal Church of St. Patrick, whose successors in the 
Episcopal line became, in the sixteenth century, the reform- 
ers of the Church, without exceptions sufficient to keep up the 
Popish schism : so that that schism was reproduced entirely 
by the influence of Spanish and Italian gold, and the fresh 
importation of Italian and Spanish Bishops. Xor did I care 
to be informed that the average income of the Irish clergy 
was but $1,000 a year: while the result of their labors, since 
the beginning of the present century, has shown an increase 
of clergymen from 1,000 to 2,000, of whom eight hundred are 
laborious curates : a still larger increase of churches, from 639 
to 1,375, besides 200 licensed chapels; and the restoration 
from Popery of ' : a great company of the priests" to the 
ancient church, so that the establishment of an asylum for 
their reception has been found necessary ; and all this in the 
face of a hostile government, the abolition of ten bishoprics, 
and the confiscation to the State, for secular uses, of 1,480 
glebes, and of an annual income of $1,500,000, once devoted 
in good faith by men, in their last will and testament, to pious 
uses. 

Again, my sympathies were lavished on the poor, down- 
trodden, tithe-paying English — unconscious, as I supposed, of 
their burden's and their wrongs. Xor did I care to understand, 
that, if these tithes were abolished to-morrow, the greedy 



STATE OF THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND. 533 



landlord would receive exactly one-tenth more of income, as 
his estates would be rented for the difference : while the peas- 
ant would be robbed of his time-honored church, and his child 
of its parochial school. I did not understand, that pious pro- 
prietors of estates had, in days gone by> erected these churches 
for their villagers and farmers ; and, instead of enriching the 
church with lands, had entailed on their children the parochial 
tithes, for religious and charitable uses among the poor. I 
did not care to understand, how deeply seated must be the 
religious principle in the breast of a nation accustomed to un- 
derstand their rights and to redress their wrongs, and to re- 
quire a quid pro quo in all their compromises ; yet willing, 
against the combined opposition of Papists, Dissenters, and 
Infidels, to surrender, with Abraham, a tenth of all to the great 
Melchizedek. I did not care to know, that the large incomes 
of some of the Bishops and clergy were the result of a provi- 
dential purpose, developing the wealth of a highly-favored 
nation, on a small island of the sea, and enhancing the value 
of the property which was little worth when first donated by 
a pious ancestry to a poor and suffering Church. Nor did I 
care to know that, after all, there were twelve thousand clergy- 
men in England, each living on less than fourteen hundred dol- 
lars ; that out of thirteen thousand working clergy more 
than ten thousand subsist on a salary of £114, or Jive hundred 
dollars a year! Mr. Baptist Noel, who furnishes an unex- 
ceptionable testimony to most of these facts, tells us that 5,230 
hard-working curates receive but the average income of $370, 
while 4,882 incumbents receive themselves but $700 a year. 
There is but one living in England, which, by the accidental 
rise of property, is worth $30,000 ; and but one other that is 
worth $20,000; three others of the value of $14,000 ; thir- 
teen of $9,000; thirty-two of $7,000; and only 1,425 of the 
value of $2,300 and upwards. Nor did I know any thing of 
the interior or domestic policy of the Church of England, un- 



534 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



der which the clergy are expected to head all subscriptions 
for charitable purposes and public improvements, to an ex- 
tent unknown, undreamed of, this side of the waters : besides 
employing their curates at their own expense. Lately a vener- 
able Bishop has gone to his rest, of whom it was ascertained, 
at his demise, that more than a million of dollars from his 
income and private fortune had been expended on public and 
charitable uses. A noble Bishop, of the order and spirit of 
St. Thomas in the distant East, has lately given out of his 
private fortune $100,000 towards the erection of a Cathedral 
in a heathen land. A Bishop, worthy of the name of Cole- 
ridge, and lately gone to rest, surrendered, years ago, one-half 
of the Episcopal endowment, to erect a new Diocese. An 
unendowed Bishop in the Church of Scotland has lately, from 
his private fortune, endowed another Diocese in the North. 
The erection and endowment of churches, schools, and chari- 
ties, by Rectors in England, at an expense of five, ten, twenty, 
fifty thousand dollars, is an every-day occurrence ; while these 
donations have sometimes reached, and are reaching at this 
moment, in some instances, the enormous sums of hundreds 
of thousands ! We have nothing like it on this side of the 
Atlantic. These large livings are sometimes given back, with 
as much again, to the Church and to the poor. Their system 
of curacies absorbs another vast portion of these revenues ; 
so that, in the majority of cases, the clergy are supported in 
a great measure by their private fortunes, or their personal 
exertions. One of the most devoted and most hated Bishops 
in England, and one continually cried down as a wealthy and 
pampered Lord, said solemnly to an American Bishop long ago, 
that so great were the demands upon his income for charita- 
ble and public purposes, he should not leave his family, from 
the income of his Episcopate, a single farthing at his death. 
The British people are not an ignorant or superstitious people, 
wont to submit quietly to grievances and wrongs. They are 



SMALL INCOMES. 



535 



acquainted with these facts ; and every hour a wealthy and 
noble laity, with a virtue and piety unknown in any land 
before, are pouring their unbounded voluntary offerings, be- 
sides their cheerful and accustomed tithes, into the lap of 
such a Church ; while every hour gives fresh demonstration 
to the saying of Lacon, that " in no country do the clergy 
have so much power, and in no country do they abuse it so 
little, as in England." With all its real wealth and alleged 
luxury, and with all the tempting and corrupting influences 
of state-patronage and state misrule, it is the only state- 
religion or state-church since the Reformation that has pre- 
served the succession of an uncorrupted doctrine ; and ever 
and anon has shown its inherent vitality by a re-awakening, 
and made its power felt, as well abroad as at home. 

Yes, for every Presbyterian preacher in America living on 
a minimum salary, I will undertake to produce three of the 
Church of England living, in a more expensive country, on a 
smaller income. Will you accept the challenge? When 
will you produce 10,000 hard-working ministers, as the 
Church of England can, subsisting each on less than $500 % 
When shall we see, in this land of cheaper bread and of 
alleged cheaper religion, 5,300 pastors subsisting on $370 1 
No, no ! The hardship is not in England, nor yet in Ireland, 
where the landed property is Episcopal, and its proprietors 
consent gladly to this reduction from their profits. The 
hardship is in Scotland, where a Presbyterian kirk is sup- 
ported by tithes from property of which, as the Edinburgh 
Review admits, three-fourths belong to Episcopalians. No, 
no ! The people most taxed for the support of religion are 
not the people of England, but the people of the quiet vil- 
lages of our own beloved land : where, instead of one vener- 
able village spire, five or six churches, for as many different 
sects, must be erected ; and as many bells — if each " denom- 
ination" be not too poor and mean to have one — ring their 



536 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



discordant jar upon the air; and, instead of one spiritual 
parent to the united family, there are five or six preachers 
of different " persuasions" to be supported — that is to say, 
nineteen thousand in all, throughout the country — and all 
without the schools and charities which ennoble the villages 
of England. Even in England, the individual tax on the 
dissenter to support his preacher, is allowed, by Mr. Noel, to 
be greater than on the member of the Church of England for 
the support of the recognized religion of the land. And as 
to declension in doctrinal purity, neither Eome, nor Germany, 
nor Switzerland, has been able to bear the corrupting influence 
of an Establishment : the Church of England alone has had 
the vital force to beat back neology and its corruptions ; and 
this inherent life within the Church has had its share in con- 
vincing me that it is the Church of Christ. 

As a modest Presbyterian, I did not suppose the fact could 
be disputed, that Missionary zeal and Missionary societies 
were exclusively the offspring of an anti-prelatical religion. 
I did not know, or care to know, that while the oldest of our 
sectarian Societies for Missions, Tracts, and Bibles was 
scarcely half a century old, the venerable Society for the 
Propagation of the Gospel was founded in England in a. d. 
1700; and that the Christian Knowledge Society, for the 
diffusion of tracts and books and Bibles, entered on its glo- 
rious course in 1698; and that the Church of England was 
vigorously planning for the world's conversion, even while 
the towers of her cathedrals lay prostrate before the batteries 
of a Puritan artillery, and her altars were yet smoking from 
the fires of the fanatical incendiary. What Presbyterian 
knows that the former of these societies is in the annual 
receipt of $400,000, and the latter of more than $500,000, 
while the Church Missionary Society of London receives half 
a million more, and innumerable charities, amounting to a 
great many annual millions are incessantly pouring in from 



CONQUESTS OF THE CHURCH. 



537 



a people, whose ideas of obligation to Almighty God are not 
satisfied with even a Nation's tithes. See $600,000 raised 
within a little while to increase the number of free churches 
in London ; see three hundred new churches spring up in the 
lifetime of a single Bishop in the Diocese of Chester ; see 
sixty new churches, nearer by, grow up in a single year in 
the desert-diocese of Toronto. And what this Church is 
doing at these points, she is doing everywhere. And pray 
what was Presbyterian Scotland doing all this while for the 
world's regeneration? or Presbyterian Holland? or Puritan 
England under Cromwell ? or Presbyterian Geneva ? or Pres- 
byterian Germany, or Denmark, or Prussia % Nothing. 
"While the Episcopal Church numbers but one-fifth of Protes- 
tant Christendom : her voluntary annual charities, as figures 
show, are five times larger than those of the whole Protestant 
world besides. The public charities of London alone, amount 
to a greater annual sum than those of all the rest of Protest- 
ant Europe ! And while the Protestant world slumbered, 
and even lost the faith, at home : the Church of England was 
reaping the ripe field, and would never have put her sickle in 
the belt, only that the Spanish Armada, or the Gunpowder 
plot, or the arming of the Puritans for civil war, obliged her 
to draw, in its stead, the sword which she was never first to 
draw against Puritan or Papist. And while the colonies of 
England are circling the earth with light, and raising up 
Christian empires in Asia, or Australia, or wherever the pillar 
of cloud directs her hosts : what — what have Geneva, and 
Germany, and Prussia, and Denmark, and Holland, and Scot- 
land, done towards the illumination of this globe? While 
they have lost the faith at home, I am personally told by the 
Moravian missionaries at Surinam, that not an individual in 
that colony, of the Dutch, is a married man ; and it is per- 
fectly well known that in the important colonies of Holland 
in the East, the conversion of her Christians to Mohammed- 



538 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



anism, is altogether a more frequent occurrence than that of 
a Mohammedan to Christianity ! In one of the Dutch col- 
onies of Southern Asia, drummers have recently been sent 
forth, by order of government, throughout the country, to 
beat the people to baptism, at so much a head. And if the 
ringing of bells, by Tetzel and his companions on the streets, 
selling releases from purgatory at so much a month, was 
enough to rouse Luther to his task : so is this beating of 
drums in Presbyterian colonies, and beating of pulpit-cushions 
everywhere resorted to now, to convince men of even the 
propriety of baptism, enough to wake the earnest mind of 
universal Protestantism to a repudiation of principles that 
lead to such results. 

I grant that the outburst of Puritanism in England was 
succeeded by a deep and deadening torpor. I grant that the 
short reign of evangelicalism in England, except as it was a 
step toward the earth-comprehending views of the Catholic 
faith, did little toward the extension of the Church. Yet it 
was well. It was the spasmodic respiration that, after the 
apparent suspension of vitality, precedes the healthy and 
deep-drawn breathing of a natural life. Evangelicalism was 
too nearly allied to Puritanism to rebuild the altars that the 
latter had cast down, to restore the daily sacrifice which the 
latter had supplanted, or to abhor the schism which the latter 
had perpetrated. At length, an event occurred that waked 
the lethargic lion from his slumbers. The Puritan and Papist, 
returning to a combination formed repeatedly under Eliza- 
beth and Charles and Anne, swept from the Irish Church ten 
bishoprics at once. Good men grew pale. The alarm 
reached the Universities. Oxford stood in the breach, and 
asserted once more the prerogative and destiny of the true 
Catholic Church. And since that perfidious deed of 1833 — 
which the Papists could never have perpetrated but for the 
aid of the Puritans, nor the Puritans but for the help of the 



STRENGTH OF THE CATHOLIC PRINCIPLE. 539 



Papists — what hare we seen % Two thousand new churches 
erected in England alone ; the churches throughout the king- 
dom universally restored at an expense never to be estimated; 
an increase of clergy exceeding the increase of churches ; the 
number of congregations added to the Church exceeding the 
number of individuals drawn off to Geneva or Rome ; more 
than a million of money raised by voluntary subscription for 
the scriptural education of children ; a whole system for the 
training of school-teachers established ; the reorganization of 
almost every diocese, on the principle of its spiritual unity ; 
the founding and endowing of twenty-five new dioceses, with 
their Bishops, in the distant colonies, with the prospect of a 
still greater increase ; the number of missionaries and cate- 
chists nearly doubled; a missionary College founded and 
endowed on the site of the old St. Augustine's in Canterbury, 
by the charities of heavenly-minded laymen, for training 
missionaries in all the languages of the earth; the erec- 
tion of Colleges and Cathedrals on lasting foundations in 
many of the colonies ; 500 villages, in India alone, brought 
into the Church ; a diocese permanently endowed in China, 
in Jerusalem, in the Holy City, and nine others in heathen 
lands; sixty new churches erected in Toronto alone, in a 
single year, with one hundred and fifty clergy in that single 
diocese ; more than a hundred clergy with their churches and 
their Bishop in Jamaica, where Puritanism and Evangelical- 
ism had been able to produce, as their combined result, but 
twenty churches that, altogether, might seat two thousand in 
a population of near half a million ; a large number of Irish 
priests restored to the ancient Church; and the total number 
of dissenters in Great Britain materially lessened : and all 
this the result of some seventeen years' experiment of the 
Catholic principle, and in the face of the oppressions of a time- 
serving government, and the persecutions of a mixed multi- 
tude of Papists and ultra-Protestants. No wonder there has 



640 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



been a hue and cry. When the Ark moves, the mountains 
skip like rams, and the little hills like lambs. And the late 
appeal of the " Evangelical" party to the secular authorities, 
to determine a question of heresy ; and the appeal of that 
party, and all its Erastian brood within and without the 
Church, to the secular arm, to repel a " papal aggression" — 
contrasting so painfully with that quiet confidence in the 
goodness of their cause, which has lately enabled the Patri- 
archs of the Eastern Churches to beat back effectually the 
encroachments of the Pope, by appealing calmly and without 
invective to the Fathers and Councils of antiquity — will have 
but the ultimate effect to rouse the remaining energies of a 
principle in the Church of England, which needs only to be 
roused, to conquer. 

I confess, however, that I was drawn toward the Church, 
not so much by these outward phases, which I had little no- 
ticed, as by observing the influences, on individual character, 
of that hidden and inner life of which these are but the out- 
ward signs. " Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things 
are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, if there be any virtue, if 
there be any praise," I had seen the happiest combination of 
them all in individuals moulded under the lofty and ennobling 
influences of the Church of England. I became intimate with 
numbers of persons whose simplicity, and fervor, and single- 
mindedness, and innocence of speech, and purity of life, and 
daily benefactions, graced with all the charms of a cultivated 
intellect and expanded heart, introduced me, for the first time, 
to a religion which certainly I had not supposed to exist upon 
the earth. I saw a piety without cant, that I had never seen 
before; a zeal without noise, a charity without show, a fixed- 
ness in doctrine, a heavenly-minded quietness of character, 
an ease and natural free-breathing of religion, a warmth of 
hospitality, a rootedness of friendship, a daily entering into 



FEASTS AND FASTS* 



541 



the details of neighborhood sufferings and sorrows ; in short, 
a doing and a way of doing every thing, which I had never 
seen before, combining, as I had never seen before, the fea- 
tures of the beautiful ideal, in a character moulded by the 
precepts and penetrated by the Spirit of the Blessed Master : 
so that I could not but feel that this was the finger, and this 
the Church, of God. I had opportunities also of seeing a 
number of those earnest and heavenly-minded Curates in the 
village and country parishes of England, who are spend- 
ing and being spent in daily and unwearied alms-deeds, 
to an extent and an amount that I had never dreamed of as 
existing on this earth ; and, after what I had seen of my own 
dwindled, dwarfish, sluggish, and degenerated faith, and its 
terrible results in Switzerland and Germany and Europe 
generally, these things led me to marvel the more, that 
a Religion which I had despised could, even though estab- 
lished and fettered by the law, form hearts so true and lives 
so pure, neighborhoods so happy and a nation so good and 
great. 

Besides these things, I marvelled much at the weakness of 
the Brethren in the Episcopal Church in observing fasts and 
festivals. Why keep Christmas-day, it is said,- when there is 
no command to keep it, and no certainty that our Lord was 
born upon that day ? Sirs, ye do err, not knowing the affec- 
tions nor intentions of the Church. The Church does not 
keep the day : but as the faithful and true Witness, she 
keeps the doctrine of the mighty Incarnation, by which the 
Lord from heaven is made the second Adam, or the second 
representative and life-imparting Man. Ye, who have not 
kept the day, have lost the doctrine of the Word made flesh, 
and the Word-flesh made a quickening Spirit. To you, a 
full-grown Sacrifice, to suffer and make over the merit of 
those sufferings to man, is the sublimest, as it is the only 
essential conception of the purposes of the Incarnation ; and 

46 



542 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



a body dropped for our Saviour from the clouds, or moulded 
from the clay, would have answered the purposes of this 
theological abstraction. To us who have other views, who 
see other purposes, to be accomplished by the assumption of 
our Nature : it was necessary that our Lord should pass 
through all the stages of a human life. Wait for a command 
to keep the bright day of rejoicing % Oh, no ! A Catholic 
heart would require a " Thou shalt not" to restrain it from 
this tribute. Away with the quibbling of an unbelieving age, 
" Ye do not know the day I" Again we tell you, that it is 
not the day, but the doctrine, that we keep. Besides, the 
settling down of universal Christendom upon this as the right 
day, is as much a presumptive proof that it is the proper 
anniversary : as that all Christendom agreeing, after fierce 
controversies for three hundred years, upon the present books 
of Scripture, is demonstration of the care and caution exer- 
cised in arriving at the truth. And there are reasons, based 
on the chain of incidents recorded by the Evangelists, in con- 
nection with the established data of the twenty-four courses 
of the priests, which, as men profoundly learned in chronology 
assure us, lead to the very date that we actually observe. 
But what if they did not 1 Are the devotions and rejoicings 
of a nation any the less loyal, when a sovereign, because his 
court may be in mourning, has postponed for a month the 
festivities of his birthday ? Is our patriotism or enthusiasm 
the less earnest or less lawful, because, when the " glorious 
Fourth" falls on a Sunday, we defer the celebration of it to the 
following day % Is the Sabbath any the less acceptably kept, 
because it begins and ends differently in different longitudes 1 
Or have the Puritans been less sincere or dutiful to their an- 
cestors, because, by an error in translating from the Old 
Style to the New, they have rent the air with their hosannas 
on the 22d of December : whereas the true " forefathers' day" 
on which they actually touched Plymouth rock, — was the 



THE BIBLE AKGUMENT. 



543 



21st 1* Away with such cold, calculating quibbles about the 
exact day or hour ! It is but a cavil.' You know the day 
and hour, on a Wednesday, when the Lord of glory was be- 
trayed into the hands of sinners : yet you do not keep it. 
You know the exact day and hour of his grief and passion, 
on an awful Friday : yet you do not keep it. You know the 
day and hour when He rose from the dead, and all the mem- 
bers of his body became partakers of His resurrection : yet 
you do not keep it. You know the day that he ascended 
into heaven, to appear in the presence of God for us : and 
yet you do not keep it. You know the day and hour when 
the Holy Ghost came down to dwell in our mortal bodies, 
and impart the life of Jesus to a universal Church : yet you 
do not keep it. Will you keep nothing that is not com- 
manded in the Bible ? Nay ! You baptize infants, you give 
females the communion, you pass the Sabbath over to a dif- 
ferent day, you build temples, you form voluntary Societies 
and keep their anniversaries, and do numerous other things 
nowhere commanded: while things that are commanded — 
the washing each other's feet, the anointing of your sick with 
oil by the Elders, the kiss of peace, the love-feast, and many 
other such things — you repudiate. Our Lord himself kept 
forms and feasts which Moses had not commanded, but which 
commended illustrious deliverances by the hand of God, to 
the devout remembrance of a pious nation. Waiting for a 
commandment 1 No ! I remember how vainly, when I was 
a Presbyterian preacher, I looked for a command to observe 
Family Prayer ; and, when I could not find the command- 
ment, I looked as unsuccessfully for an example of this prac- 
tice, I could find commands and examples enough for daily 
morning and evening prayer ; but it was in the Temple, 
which comported rather with Episcopacy than with Puritan- 

* So the " Family Christian Almanac*' of the American Tract Society, bearing 
the testimony of »' all the Evangelical" denominations, tells us. 



544 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



ism : yet for Family Prayer I could find neither example 
nor precept. The truth is, the Gospel is a " law of liberty ;" 
law, as it settles the principle ; liberty, as it respects the time 
and mode. The temple is the place for prayer. If I cannot 
reach it, with Peter and John : let me, with Daniel in Baby- 
lon, Cornelius hi Ceesarea, or Peter on the housetop in Joppa, 
join the adoring throng where I can ; and, if I can, at "the 
hour of prayer," be it the third, or the sixth, or the ninth. 
This modern Family Prayer, which has how dwindled into 
nothing, has become a sad substitute for God's ancient way. 
The " law''' is prayer ; I have a liberty as to time and place 
and circumstance. The law is fasting ; the Church herself 
has a "liberty" only as regards the time. Moses and Elijah, 
without commandment, fasted forty days. The J ewish Church 
had its fast likewise of forty days. The cold sectarian worid 
asks, » 

" Wrapped up in majesty divine, 
Doth God regard on what we dine?" 

The warm-hearted Christian, keeping a fast kept by the an- 
cient Jews before the passover, and kept by Christ, and kept 
by Irenaeus and his companions who were bom in the days 
of the Apostles, takes down his harp and sings : 

" "Welcome, dear feast of Lent ! who loves not thee, 
He loves not temperance, nor authority, 

But is composed of passion. 
The Scriptures bid us fast ; the Church says now, 
Give to thy mother what thou wouldst allow 

To every corporation. 
It's true we cannot reach Christ's fortieth day ; 
Yet to go part of that religious way, 

Is better than to rest. 
"We cannot reach our Saviour's purity ; 
Yet we are bid be holy even as He, 

In both let's do our best. 



FASTING. 



545 



"Who goeth in the way which Christ has gone, 
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one 

That travelleth by-ways ; 
Perhaps my God, though He be far before, 
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more, 

May strengthen my decays." 

But the flesh pleads that Christ was miraculously supported 
in His fast. This is not so certain. Yet, if this is to be the 
cavilling of those who ought to be believers, let us carry the 
cavil farther, and say we will not visit the sick because we 
cannot heal them by a touch ; we will not pay our debt to 
the house of mourning, because we cannot call back the dead 
of Nain and of Bethany to life ; we will not feed the hungry, 
because we cannot multiply our loaves and fishes to suffice 
the whole multitude ; we will in fact do nothing, because we 
can do nothing as He did. Sectarians tell us that they have 
tried fasting, and it has done them no good. I have seen 
unhappy men who have told me that they had tried pray- 
ing, and that it had done them no good. No wonder. 
Such praying, such fasting, by fits and starts, can never do 
one good. Prayer once a month, or once a year, can effect 
nothing. Think you the Lord intended this, when he de- 
clared, "This kind goeth not forth but by prayer and 
fasting ?" Think you St. Paul meant only this, when he said 
to wives and husbands, " Defraud ye not one the other, ex- 
cept it be with consent for a time, that ye may give your- 
selves to fasting and prayer V As these are texts (and there 
are many others) which the Ancient Keligion alone can un- 
derstand or explain, since they are allusions to customs already 
established before the New Testament was written : so they 
compel me to condemn the schisms of Presbytery for their 
recent repudiation of all true and proper fasting, as I would a 
system that should repudiate alms-giving and prayer. None 
but the Catholic religion, it would appear, can perpetuate 

45* 



546 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



those awful impressions of our duties and our dangers, those 
mighty conceptions of the Incarnation the Cross, and the 
Resurrection, which shall compel the heart, conscious of the 
magnitude of the occasion, to fastings and commemorations. 
What would Jesus have thought of St. Peter and St. James 
and of him who leaned upon His breast that night : if on the 
second, or the third, or the thirtieth anniversary of that tre- 
mendous moment, no prayers, no preachings, no sacraments, 
no communings with each other, should commemorate the 
mighty mystery of that day and hour % Who can imagine 
that St. John would not say to Poly carp : " This, Brother, is 
the day on which the Lord of glory hanged upon the cross ]" 
Who can imagine that Smyrna, and Antioch, and Jerusalem, 
and Rome, were not made glad when Peter and Paul and 
John and Ignatius and Polycarp let fall in their discourses 
the hint, that " To-day He became the first-fruits of them 
that slept ?" Who can suppose that, to such a mind as St. 
Paul's, or to such a heart as St. John's, the illustrious day 
and hour had been suffered to pass over without notice? 
Nay, St. Paul ' ; must by all means keep this feast that 
cometh, in Jerusalem and " hasted, if it were possible for 
him, to be at Jerusalem the day of Pentecost ;"f and when 
there, with St. James and the great multitude, would there 
be nothing said of the descending, on that day, of the adora- 
ble Comforter, in visible and glorious majesty, to take the 
place of Christ in His Body which is His Church? Even 
Neander allows the force of these considerations. 

But Dr. Miller tells his classes that Easter is a word de- 
rived from the name of the Saxon goddess Eostra. Well ; 
altar, temple, divinity, piety, religion, are the altar templum, 
divinitas, pietas, religio, of the ancient Pagans. But Dr. 
Miller and Buck's Theological Dictionary do err. Easter is 
from, the ancient word East, or Est, or Ost, the same in 

* Acts, xriii. 21. + Acts. xx. 16. 



EASTER. 



547 



Saxon, French, and German, signifying the Rising — the day 
of the Lord's rising from the dead. But Dr. Miller tells us 
that " there was a great controversy in the second century 
about Easter," proving conclusively that it was not of Apos- 
tolic origin. Indeed! "So there was a great controversy," 
may the Baptists say, "in the third century about Infant 
Baptism, demonstrating that it was not of Apostolic origin." 
But let us sift this thing a little. Two hundred and sixty-six 
bishops met in Egypt to settle the question, not whether 
infants were to be baptized, but whether they were to be 
baptized on the eighth day : and the greatest proof of infant 
baptism, like that of Episcopacy, is that no Council ever 
established it, or even debated the question. So it was with 
Easter, or rather the time and duration of the preceding fast : 
it was a question of time ; and, moreover, like baptism on 
the eighth day, a question between Christianity in the East, 
where the Jews controlled the details of discipline under the 
lenient permission of the Apostles, in innocent accommoda- 
tion to their ancient predilections ; and the freer Christianity 
of the West, which desired to combine the Easter with the 
Sunday. So it was with the question of Circumcision, and 
the seventh-day Sabbath, and various other matters. In this, 
as in many Jewish rites and prejudices, the Apostles had 
always allowed a latitude and liberty. The travelling of a 
Bishop and convert of St. John from the distant East, to pro- 
duce uniformity between the Jewish Churches (so to call them) 
and the free Gentile Churches in the West, on the mere ques- 
tion of date and duration : is of all proofs the best, that the 
Lenten fast and the feast of Easter were observed from the 
times of the Apostles. But why reason longer 1 ? To the 
cold, ultra-Protestant, more would not suffice : to the warm 
and bursting heart, who lives in antiquity with the Manger, 
and the Cross, and the Sepulchre, less is enough. 

Thus I was compelled to listen, to the last, to all the mis- 



548 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



erable quibblings which, in the aggregate, might perhaps rec- 
oncile me still to my separated sojourn, out of God's ancient 
Church. But now that I have been adopted into the glorious 
Household tracing its genealogies to the ancient ones, and 
living familiarly amidst the sweet anniversaries kept in the 
Family from the beginning : how beautiful and bright dawn 
the days as they come round. On Christmas we go with our 
children, and show them the little hands and feet of the mys- 
terious Babe ; and tell them the story of the manger, of 
Herod and the Innocents, and the cruel flight into Egypt : 
and make on them impressions they can never lose. We 
show them His star in the East, and keep alive His manifes- 
tation to the Gentiles. We bring the fir, and the pine, and 
the box together to beautify the sanctuary, and make the 
place of His feet glorious, now, when the Lord whom we seek 
hath come to His Temple, and as our Simeons explain it, the 
glory of the latter Church is greater than the glory of the 
former. We fast — we must fast, we cannot abstain from 
fasting, for that were a more painful abstinence — as the awful 
mystery of His. Passion is approaching. W^e keep, through- 
out the year, the Wednesday and the .Eriday Litanies, as if 
to robe in penitence the days of the Betrayal and the Cruci- 
fixion. We keep the forty days of Lent, to consider well the 
sins that procured this terrific Mystery, and to wash with our 
tears the feet that our sins had first bathed with blood. No 
sudden burst of penitence will satisfy the Catholic Religion : 
and once a year she calls her children to withdraw from the 
vanities of life, and spend a protracted period in sorrow and 
in prayer. We follow Him to the grave, and watch the 
Holy Sepulchre. We wait for His return from the place of 
the departed, whither His soul descended, while separated 
from the Body. On Easter morning, we pass the exultation 
round the globe, wherever there are voices to repeat " The 
Lord is risen L" The forty days of joy go over, and we follow 



ANNIVERSARIES. 



549 



our second Adam into the heavens. And on the tenth day 
afterward, we keep the joyful Pentecost. Then comes the 
feast of Trinity, the two Persons of the Godhead having vis- 
ibly descended. And from that day onward the Church draws 
our attention to the precepts and practices, as she had done 
during the previous division of the year to the great facts and 
doctrines, of our Faith. All this is solid gold. We cannot 
part with it for tinsel. 

As the relative positions, and distances, and mutual rela- 
tions and bearings of the heavenly bodies, present but one 
strange chaos to the vulgar eye : so, but a few years since, 
on opening a Prayer-Book, these objects stamped upon its 
pages were to me but a congeries of unmeaning, arbitrary 
ordinances. Now I see in them a heavenly science. For as 
the earth and sun and heavenly bodies return this year to the 
same relative position that they occupied a year ago, and begin 
the same course that they then began : so the Church wanders 
in search of nothing new, but is for ever laboring to keep her- 
self and her children in the old beaten path, swerving never 
from her orbit. As we see, in our day, the - same stars of 
heaven that Ignatius and Irenseus saw : so we hold the same 
truths that Ignatius and Irenaeus held. The Incarnation, the 
Advent, the Redemption, the Resurrection, the Ascension, 
the manifold operation of the Pentecostal Spirit ; these are 
her teachings, these the stars that glow and brighten in her 
sky : while the still lesser lights of truth and grace twinkle 
and glitter as gems between. They always were her teach- 
ings, her lights that gave shine unto the world. And for fear 
that one of them should be eclipsed, she has ordained that 
every truth and precept of religion shall have, in turn, its 
blessed anniversary. Thus, as the sun comes and goes from 
tropic to tropic, or as the earth revolves from solstice to sol- 
stice : so the unvarying round of truth returns again and 
again, continually from Advent to Advent, in an eternal 



550 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



circle ; while the old Church, like the old Earth, in all Her 
revolutions, and in calm or storm, points always to Her one, 
everlasting, Bright and Morning Star. When they cry, " Lo, 
here is Christ ; or, Lo, He is there :" her voice is, " Go not 
after them." And they who quarrel with her exact immu- 
tability, or weary of her annual round, may as well quarrel 
with the fixed and unalterable laws of the universe, and with 
the established routine that they, with majestic regularity, 
for ever reproduce. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 



RETROSPECT. 

But for this via media — this via vera, too — J must have 
followed my own private reasonings into all the vagaries of 
German rationalism ; or have been led, by the yearnings of a 
better disposition, into the mazes of Popish superstition. As 
it has been therefore, to me, a matter of life and death, per- 
haps I may be forgiven if I have sometimes given utterance 
to the exuberance of my joy : 

"As the wave, while it welcomes the moment of rest, 
Still heaves, as remembering ills that are o'er." 

I. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion that 
taught me, before I could read, that " God, from all eternity, 
for his own glory, hath fore-ordained whatsoever comes to 
pass?" 

II. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion that, 
before it would allow me to teach or preach, obliged me to 
confess that, " by the decree of God, some men and angels 
are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others fore-ordained 

I to everlasting death ;" and that " these men and angels, thus 
predestinated and fore-ordained, are particularly and unchange- 
ably designed, and their number is so certain and definite, 
that it cannot be either increased or diminished V 9 

IE. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion that 



552 



LOOKING FOR THE CECRCK. 



required of me, as its minister, to believe, that " neither are 
any other redeemed by Christ, but the elect only V 
, IV. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion which 
taught me that, for Adam's sin alone, his whole posterity are 
"by nature children of wrath, bondslaves of Satan, and justly 
liable ro all punishment in this world and. that which is to 
come, everlasting separation from the comfortable presence 
of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, with- 
out intermission, in hell fire for ever f Lo. Cat. Qu. 29. 

V. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion which 
taught me, that "elect infants, dying in infancy, are re- 
generated and saved, and so also all other elect persons 
[i. e., idiots, &c] who are incapable of being outwardly 
called f 

VL Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion, which, 
while it declared that ' ; neither are any other redeemed by 
Christ but the elect only," still allowed me, and expected me, 
to "preach the Gospel [i. e.. glad tidings] to every creature 
— an insincerity a Jesuit should blush for, which many Cal- 
vinistic preachers will not submit to, and which, I well re- 
member, was to my fellow-students a crux sinceritaiis of the 
most distressing nature ? 

VII. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion which, 
while it held that only the elect can have the " effectual call- 
ing" of God : s Spirit, " enabling them to repent yet required 
me to summon all others to repentance, on pain of an aggra- 
vated damnation for not repenting ? 

~VTH. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion, which, | 
by these startling imputations on our Maker, obliges its min- 
isters to disbelieve what they subscribe, or to keep back what A 
they believe, or . boldly to ajlow the imputations, and thus ^ 
become at once the accusers and defenders of their Maker, * 
employing their discourses - constant^ in painful, intellectual, 
hair-splitting explanations, quite to the satisfaction of the 



KETKOSPECT. 



553 



people, but — as we have often confessed in our little coteries 
—never to our own % 

IX. I have done also with those off-hand prayers, in which 
dissent is happy; and with those rhymes which, with the 
" long" prayer, are all that it possesses to impart a concep- 
tion of the dignity and sublimity of Christian worship. It has 
expelled the Psalms, as inspired and sung by David, chanted 
by the prophets, echoed through the temple and the syna- 
gogues, adopted by Christ and his Apostles, and sung in all 
churches in all lands for fifteen centuries: and instead of 
them has substituted its jingling verses, made often ridiculous 
enough by the solemn pauses and repetitions demanded by 
the musical taste of sectarian composers.* 

X. I could not approve the religion that forbids the laity 
joining in the worship of God, and has even silenced the 
"Amen" of the profanum vulgus. As we said before, Give 
back, thou man of Eome, the cup to a thirsting flock : give 
back, thou man of Geneva, the liturgy to a congregation of 
dumb worshippers ! • 

XL Thank God, I have now a Liturgy, venerable for its 
years, glorious for its associations, heavenly in its strain, di- 
vine in its composition, nine-tenths whereof are from the 
word of God, and able to set us amidst the choirs and voices 
of angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven ; " a 
truly lordly dish ; a fatness that never corrupts ; the more 
we taste, the more we hunger, with desires that are ever fed 
and never cloyed." 

XII. The reasons I have given for returning to the use of 
liturgies are too many to be repeated here, and I shall only 
add to them the precious balm which they shed around the 

* Good Bishop Seabury replied to a music-teacher, who had given a public re- 
hearsal, and who sought the commendation of the bishop, That his sympathies 
were so engaged with poor Aaron, while they "ran down his beard" five or six 
times over, that he really could think of nothing else. 

47 



554 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



sick-room. Since these chapters were begun, my venerable 
father (may he rest in peace !) has gone, as I believe, to re- 
ceive in Paradise the foretastes of a bright reward. Long he 
lay ill. But in all that time, no mortal, save a Methodist min- 
ister passing by, knelt beside his dying bed. His daughters — 
daughters now also of the Church — were with him, rendering 
all human sympathy and succor; but disallowed by sectarian 
habit from even proposing the solace of written words, to a 
dying parent. Thus ten thousand sicken, and the silence of 
the sick-room is not broken by the voice of prayer. And 
thus by sea and land ten thousand die, and are sent like dogs 
to the grave, without the embalming of a Christian hand ; 
while thousands are daily saved from these worse than hea- 
thenish alternatives, by one little " Book of Common Prayer." 

XIII. In returning to liturgical worship, I have returned to 
a principle once buffeted and crucified by Dissenters, but now 
regarded by some of them with very great respect. Calvin, 
Luther, Knox, Baxter, Wesley, all prepared liturgies for their 
followers ; Doctors Winchester and Smyth, both classmates 
of mine at Princeton, have both put forth books of prayers; 
the Seamen's Society has set forth forms ; and even Doctor 
Spring has given us a volume of devotions. What a change 
has come over us ! How fast the deadly wound of the Beast 
is healing ! Are we not all moving on towards Popery to- 
gether? From circumstances within my knowledge, I am 
quite sure that the more enlightened and grave of the Pres- 
byterian ministry would delight to see a liturgy adopted at 
once, but that it would look like backing out from an ad- 
vanced position. But liturgy they can never have. A jewel 
once lost among them, they can never recover. But though 
sectarians pretend that the night hangs dark over the Church, • 
yet hear how, even in this our darkest hour, the voices of the 
night fall upon the ear of a favorite son of dissent : — The Rev. 
H. W. Beecher, of Brooklyn, writes thus from Scotland : 



RETROSPECT. 



555 



" The services began. You know my mother was, until her mar- 
riage, in the communion of the Episcopal Church ; this thought hardly- 
left me, while I sat, grateful for the privilege of worshipping God 
through a service that had expressed so often her devotions. [Aye, 
this is a sweet and holy tie among us, whether separated by sea, or 
land, or death.] I cannot tell you how much I was affected. / had 
never had such a trance of worship, and 1 shall never have such another 
view until I gain the gate. 

"I am so ignorant of the Church Service, that I cannot tell the va- 
rious parts by their right names— but the portions which most affected 
me, were the prayers and responses which the choir sang. I had 
never heard any part of a supplication — a direct prayer — sung by a 
choir ; and it seemed as though I heard, not with my ear, but with my 
soul. I was dissolved — my whole being seemed to me like an incense 
wafted gratefully towards God. The Divine presence rose before me in 
wondrous majesty, but of ineffable gentleness and goodness; and I 
could not stay away from more familiar approach, but seemed irre- 
sistibly, yet gently, drawn toward God. My soul, then thou didst 
magnify the Lord, and rejoice in the God of thy salvation ! And then 
came to my mind the many exultations of the Psalms of David, and 
never before were the expressions and figures so noble and so necessary 
to express what I felt. I had risen, it seemed to me, so high, that I 
was where David was when his soul conceived the things which he 
wrote. Throughout the service, and it was an hour and a quarter 
long, whenever an " Amen" occurred, it was given by the choir, ac- 
companied by the organ and the congregation. Oh, that swell and 
solemn cadence yet rings in my ear. Not once, not a single time did 
it occur in that service, from beginning to end, without bringing tears 
from my eyes. I stood like a shrub in a spring morning — every leaf 
covered with dew, and every breeze shook down some drops. J trem- 
bled so much at times, that I was obliged to sit down. Oh, when in the 
prayers breathed forth in strains of sweet, simple, solemn music, the love 
of Christ was recognized, how I longed then to give utterance to what 
that love seemed to me. There was a moment in which the heavens 
seemed opened to me, and I saw the glory of God! All the earth 
seemed to me a storehouse of images, made to set forth the Redeemer, 
and I could scarcely keep still from crying out. I never knew, I never 
dreamed before, of what heart there was in the word Amen. Every 
time it swelled forth and died away solemnly, not my lips, not my 
mind, but my whole being said — Saviour, so let it be. 



556 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



"The sermon was preparatory to the communion, which I then first 
learned was to be celebrated. It was plain and good ; and although 
the rector had done many things in a way that led me to suppose that 
he sympathized with over much ceremony, yet in his sermon he seemed 
evangelical, and gave a right view of the Lord's Supper. For the first 
time in my life, I went forward to commune in an Episcopal Church." 

XIV. I was constrained to leave my much-loved church, 
because I believed it to be without sacraments. Long ago 
have both the golden ear-rings dropped from its ears. Once 
it held that a sacrament must consist of two parts, " the out- 
ward and the inward.'^But now ye deny the inward and 
invisible part, and hold only the outward form. Ye talk of 
a sacrament as if it were -only intended to keep us from 
forgetting that Christ died. To us, in this poor sense, all 
nature is sacramental, being consecrated by the word of God. 
Our morning ablution reminds us often and often of our birth 
from above, aye, and conveys grace by the dear remem- 
brance ; and bread and wine, upon our tables, bring to us 
often the recollection of a Saviour slain. Are these, there- 
fore, sacraments ? Yes, in your very highest sense. Why, 
sirs, all things should be sacramental, in this degree, to a 
devout mind ; for scripture hath made them so. Sun, moon, 
and stars ; earth, wind, and water ; rains and dews ; the 
cloud and bow; mountain, vale, and garden; fountain, brook, 
and river : darkness and light ; lightning and fire : trees, 
grass, and seeds ; the plough and the sickle ; the tares and 
the wheat; planting, watering; reaping; the harvest, the 
barn ; the shepherd, the fold, the lamb ; the wolf, the leopard, 
the ox, the fatling, and the lion; even the little sparrow; 
even the disgusting serpent ; dust and ashes ; wood, hay, and 
stubble ; gold and silver ; crystal and glass ; pearls and 
jewels : kings and kingdoms ; thrones and crowns ; the ship, 
the fisherman, the net, the anchor, the rock ; our suppers and 
feasts ; the bridegroom and his friend ; the bride and her 



RETROSPECT. 557 



virgins ; the marriage, the birth, the little child, the son, the 
brother, the father, the family, the prodigal ; our very food 
and drink ; our sleeping and waking ; even our walking, run- 
ning, stumbling, rising; the very roads we travel, the gates 
and doors we enter ; in short, every thing in nature, and in 
life and its occupations, the word of God has consecrated, to 
the devout mind, as remembrancers of the truth and vehicles 
of grace in Jesus Christ. They even make Christ present to 
our faith. Are they therefore sacraments'? I trow not. 
You must raise your vision higher. 

XV. They have no Baptism. The sprinkling with water 
among them is without the Spirit ; but Baptism is the Bap- 
tism " of water and the Spirit " — not a dead sprinkling under 
the law, but a living, life-conveying reality ; something of dig- 
nity and excellence enough to be the parting gift of an as- 
cending Saviour to the "nations." Away with your Jewish 
washings ! We are not under the law, but under grace. The 
shadows are gone. The substance is come. 

XVI. And yet the brethren I have left cannot escape the 
charge, that they have two baptisms : a baptism signifying 
positive regeneration in the adult, and a baptism signifying 
— no mortal can tell what — in the infant. Yet there is " one 
baptism," as there is "one God, one Lord, one faith, one 
hope ;" " for by one Spirit are we all baptized into one Body ;" 
and, could there be a difference, more certainly would that 
difference be in favor of the little child, " for of such is the 
kingdom of heaven." Dr. Alexander confesses, and so per- 
haps do all his brethren, that regeneration takes place some- 
times in infant baptism, and that there is " such a thing as 
baptismal regeneration.'''' This seems to shut the question in 
a nutshell. If it take place only sometimes, there is an election. 
Take away this election, or selection, and let all be equal in 
the sacrament, and all must be regenerated. But that dark 
system comes to my children, before they have done good 

47* 



558 



LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



or evil, and says to one, — " Sweet child, weep not ; thou hast 
been chosen to an eternal life, and over thee I set a loving 
angel who shall cover thee with his wings ;" and to the other, 
— "Thee, doomed child, I leave [theologically, " praeterition "] 
to the vexings of a tempting demon, who shall cast his toils 
about thee, and bind and blind and drag thee to his burning 
cell, for thou wast not in the slain Man's thoughts when he 
hanged upon the tree." Take this dogma away; say that 
God is no respecter of persons ; remember that there is less 
in an infant's heart to resist the entrance of the Spirit, than in 
the most approved of your adults : then, if one infant, since 
the world began, has ever been the subject (as Presbyte- 
rians allow) of "baptismal regeneration," it follows, as a 
consequence, that all who have been thus baptized must have 
been also thus regenerated. The same water ; the same in- 
fancy; the same form; the same words; the same thing. 
"I baptize thee" — and " thee" — and "thee" So it is written 
— " One Baptism." 

XVII. I left my religion, because I could not remember 
that it had ever admonished me of any duty, grace, or priv- 
ilege, accruing from my baptism. Nay, I do not know, ex- 
cept by inference from the ecclesiastical faith of my parents, 
that I was ever baptized at all. Who ever heard a Presby- 
terian sermon, to children or youth, regarding any duty, grace, 
or privilege, growing out of Baptism'? The popular inter- 
pretation of Baptism, next to giving the child a name, is, that 
it is to bind the parents to certain promises and duties. Then 
a rite should be performed on the parents. But Baptism ad- 
dresses not a word to the parents, performs no rite upon 
them. " I baptize thee " — all that is said or done is said and 
done to the child. Another cause of this neglect is the excuse 
of many, that the child was not a consulted or consenting 
party to its baptism, and therefore is not bound. Sirs, ypu 
strike deep ! You strike high ! Neither was it a consulted 



EETEOSPECT. 



559 



or consenting party in being born; the family obligation 
ceases ! Neither was it consulted in being created ; you 
undermine the throne of God! So sure as its being born 
binds it to you, and places it under your authority and love : 
so sure its being born again of water and the Spirit binds it 
to its God, and lays it under His wings. 

XVIII. I abjured my religion, because it kept from the 
people all the clear passages that speak of Baptism : — •" One 
body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one Baptism" — "the 
washing of regeneration" — "except a man be born of water 
and of the Spirit " — " the Baptism of repentance for the remis- 
sion of sins " — " Repent and be Baptized, every one of you 
in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye 
shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost" — "arise, and be 
Baptized, and wash aioay thy sins " — " buried with Christ by 
Baptism into death" — "by one Spirit are we all Baptized 
into one Body " — " that He might sanctify and cleanse it [the 
Church] with the washing of water by the word" — "the like 
figure whereunto [antitype] even Baptism doth also now save 
us" — "Jesus also [second Adam or Representative] being 
Baptized, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost de- 
scended in a bodily shape, like a dove upon Him." Who 
ever heard a sermon from a Presbyterian pulpit on any of 
these texts? I never did. Dissent ignores them. The 
Church alone is their interpreter. The Church alone is their 
proprietor. 

XIX. I have cast off a religion that, because the parents 
are not actual communicants, refuses baptism to the child, 
and leaves it to the serpent's coils. The old days have re- 
turned, when "the fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's 
teeth are set on edge." 

XX. I have given up a religion that has given birth to the 
wide-spread sect denying baptism to all infants alike. Ye 
say, Infants cannot repent, and it is written, " Repent and be 



560 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



bapti2ed." Jesus could not repent, yet it became him to 
" fulfil all righteousness." Ye say. Infants cannot believe, and 
it is written, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be 
saved." Then (as some of you have held) infants cannot be 
saved, for it is added, "He that believeth not shall be 
damned." Away with your freezing faith ! A thousand times 
away with it ! I would not believe a religion that, when I fly 
to the ark, forbids me to take my child in my arms. Would 
this make Baptism St. Peter's antitype of the Ark 1 I could 
not believe a religion that should involve the infant universe 
in the overthrow of the first Adam, and pour the stream of 
death into its being, and not allow one single drop from hands 
or feet or side of the second Adam to be conveyed into its 
veins ; that should involve it in all the sorrows that overtake 
humanity, and give it no share in human redemption. Is the 
first Adam stronger than the second'? Has judgment 
triumphed against mercy? Nay, He who spared Nineveh 
for its idol-dedicated infants, has, in an empire of grace, 
provided for the babe. If the covenant of the Gospel include 
it not, it is the first covenant with men that has shut infants 
out. With Adam and with his seed was the covenant made ; 
with Noah and his seed ; with Abraham and his seed. Has the 
Gospel abridged the love of God ? I trow not. Ye say, Away 
with the children ! But there standeth One among you who 
is "much displeased," and says, "Suffer the little children to 
come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the king- 
dom of God [the Church]." See His outspread arms ; see 
Him fold them to»His bosom; watch His symbolic act in 
laying on His hands ; hear His sweet voice bless them and 
give them to their mothers again ! 

XXI. I felt it my duty to leave my denomination, because 
I saw that it was itself fast becoming Baptist. I have already 
adduced figures; here are more. The Presbytery of New 
Brunswick — the nursery from the beginning, and the present 



BETROSPECT. 



561 



model, of Presbytery — in 1830, reported 40 ministers, 2300 
communicants, and 220 baptisms ; or, one to every ten com- 
municants. In 1847, it reported 53 ministers, 4322 commu- 
nicants, and 174 baptisms ; or, one to twenty-four. The Syn- 
od of New Jersey, the stronghold of Presbytery, in 1830, 
reported 104 ministers, 831 baptisms; in 1847, 140 ministers, 
778 baptisms. In contrast with this, the Church, claiming to 
be " the mother of us all," had but 15 ministers and 900 
communicants, yet baptisms 450, or one to every two com- 
municants ; in 1847, 60 clergy, 2270 communicants, and 
1170 baptisms, or one to less than two. Such is a true 
mother's love. 

XXII. My religion I threw away, because it threw away 
the golden tie of Confirmation, that had ever bound our 
youthful Isaacs to the altar. Yet when the Apostles heard 
that Philip the Deacon had baptized a great multitude in 
Samaria, they sent to them Peter and John, " who laid their 
hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost," " both 
men and women.'''' And when St. Paul goes to " the foundation" 
and recites the " first principles of the doctrine of Christ," he 
says, " the foundation of repentance — of faith toward God— 
of baptisms — of laying on of hands — of the resurrection — and 
of eternal judgment." This rite was retained by Luther, 
desired by Calvin, approved by Beza, coveted by Owen, 
commanded by Adam Clarke, sometimes practised by the 
older Puritans and Baptists, and to this day approved by 
prominent divines who bewail its loss — but still it is among 
the things that schism cannot keep. It tells its followers now, 
as they grow up, that they are " strangers to the covenants of 
promise, aad aliens from the commonwealth of Israel," 
''children of the devil," and that their very baptism is 
designed to teach the fact — and turns the lambs from the 
Shepherd's full hand, to feed on the world's harsh husks. 
They are addressed in the same tone as if they had been 



562 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



crowned in infancy with the turban of Mohammed, or 
devoted in the Ganges to the pollutions of Brahma. 

XXIII. By the change that I have made, I have now an 
Altar. Saint Paul says, " We have an Altar ;" and that we 
may not mistake, he adds, "whereof they have no right to 
eat which serve the tabernacle." Oh, it is sweet to see the 
Altar holding the chief place of honor in our sanctuaries — 
emblem of sacrifice, type of " things in the heavens" — sweet, 
holy, joyful place of intercession and prayer ! 

XXIV. And I can now worship God with Sacrifice. We 
have the Bread and Wine of the great Melchisedek plead- 
ing on our altar for the sins of the people. As the Jew laid 
on his altar the lamb bleeding and pleading, " O Lamb of a 
future age, have mercy upon us !" as the heathen had in all 
lands the smoking sacrifice crying, " O Seed of the Woman, 
who art to bruise the serpent's head, have mercy upon us !" 
so do we offer everywhere the Bread and Wine, a more 
excellent offering, silently and sinlessly interceding, " Lamb 
of God, who^ takest away the sins of the world, by thine 
agony and crown of thorns, thy cross and passion, have mercy 
upon us!" And thus, while Jesus presents his pleading 
wounds in heaven, His members on earth present them, in 
glorious symbols that have been from the beginning of the 
world. As in Baptism our Lord retained the use of water, 
which at the time bore a part in the sacrament of circumcision : 
so He laid aside only the bloody part of the sacrifice of the 
Altar, retaining the "meat-offering of flour and the drink- 
offering of wine," which had from the first accompanied the 
lamb slain in the Temple each morning and evening — Him- 
self to provide hereafter the Lamb, and to be verily and 
indeed present at His Altar. In both these changes of the 
form, He hath magnified the sacraments and made them 
glorious — surely He hath not made them less. It is the only 
pure offering on earth ; and so it is written, " In every place 



KETROSPECT. 



563 



incense and a pure offering shall be offered in my name." O 
how it quickens faith ! O how it kindles prayer ! O how it 
strengthens hope ! How we hear the voice of the Intercessor 
and the choirs of the angels ! How " earthly things are joined 
with heavenly, and things visible and invisible made one !" 

XXV. And as Christ was given to be " once our ransom, but 
daily our food," the commemorative rite among my former 
brethren seemed to be quite unworthy to be called the Supper 
or the Lord. If I partake of nothing but bread and wine, it 
is to my soul no feast. But now as I come to that holy table, 
it is not to eat bread and drink wine only, but it is to " eat the 
Flesh and drink the Blood of the Son of Man," — each in the 
only manner in which each can be eaten — the one with the 
lips of Sense, the other with the lips of Faith. It is now a 
Supper, a Feast, a glorious Eucharist. Schism has lost it. 
Its ministers do only what men, women and children may at 
any time anywhere do — break bread and drink wine in af- 
fectionate remembrance of their Lord. There is perhaps no 
harm in it, more than in the annual bathing of the Pilgrims 
in Jordan, in commemoration of the Baptism of our Lord and 
Saviour therein. O it is delightful to have done with types, 
and to live amidst realities — the Baptism of the Spirit, and the 
Sacrifice and Supper of the Lord ! 

XXVI. My religion was here again at a loss to explain for 
me the Scriptures. I shall cite from one place only. The 
Corinthian Christians must have known that the bread and 
wine were in remembrance of the death of Christ : and yet, 
for their irreverent reception of the sacrament, they were 
smitten with disease and visited with death. Why so terrible 
a breaking forth of the Lord's anger for the careless per- 
formance of a " commemorative rite V Schism cannot 
answer. The Church answers with Paul, for " not discern- 
ing" — mark this word — "not discerning the Lord's Body? 
The majesty and glory of the august sacrament, they had 



564 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



fallen from, into lower views. He asks, as of a fact strangely 
forgotten : — " The Bread which we break, is it not the com- 
munion [xojvwvi'oc — partaking, imparting] of the Body of 
Christ ] The cup which we bless, is it not the communion 
of the Blood of Christ? Wherefore" — notice the inference 
- — " whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the 
Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the Body and Blood of 
the Lord." And besides this fearful reasoning, an impressive 
miracle — judgment and death — are sent among them to arrest, 
at the beginning, and once for all, in the eyes of the whole 
Church, these low views of the stupendous mystery : just as 
the same messenger was sent to stamp the first schism with 
the divine reprobation, in the frightful death of Korah and 
his company. 

XXVII. And I can now understand, not only Jesus and 
Paul, but the good Cyprian when he says, " We offer our 
daily sacrifice because of our daily sins," and the mighty 
Augustines and Chrysostoms, and the glorious Basils and 
Gregories, when they speak on this theme ; back to the mar- 
tyred Ignatius, the disciple of St. John, who says, almost in 
the very words of St. Paul : — " There is but one Altar." 

XXVIII. I gave up my religion because, with its meagre 
resources of extemporaneous devotion, it can never return to 
the daily prayer and sacrifice, which were practised through- 
out the world in the beginning, and were never intermitted 
until Puritanism reared its head in the Church. 

XXIX. I grew dissatisfied to see the withdrawal of the 
Cup from the laity, and strange mixtures used instead of 
Wine ; striking, effectually with many minds, at the foresigh" 
the prudence, the Divinity of our Lord, for instituting th 
sacrament in Wine. 

XXX. My religion continued to grow distasteful, as it de 
nied such poor sacraments as it had, to the sick and the dyin 
— an abuse never perpetrated in the most cruel days of Rome 



RETROSPECT. 



565 



XXXI. Nor could I endure those arbitrary tests, with 
which thousands of congregations had fenced the communion- 
table, varying capriciously and constantly, destroying charity, 
and making the feast not one in which " His banner over us 
is love," but one at which each guest sits down with a hair- 
hung sword above his head. 

XXXII. While this religion professes to abhor popish ab- 
solution, its mode of separating " converts " from " inquirers," 
and of pronouncing formally, after deliberate examination by 
the brethren or the elders, upon their spiritual state, imparts 
an absolution far more soothing and soul-destroying than that 
of Rome, which reaches only to the next sin ; for the elders 
in effect say, " We believe you to be now converted, and that, 
however you may fall, you can never fall from grace." It 
has a paralyzing, deadening effect. The ministers perceive 
it, and lament it. 

XXXIII. I have done with this religion, because it varies 
continually the terms of its salvation. Formerly the " law- 
work " and " grace-work " with the soul, required months and 
years ; but latterly a regeneration, and repentance, and faith, 
can all be crowded into the compass of a single night or hour ! 
and the stupendous preparations for eternity are made ! 

XXXIV. I have repudiated my religion, because, in its 
latest evangelical form, it reduces the mighty circle of re- 
ligious Faith to a faith in the person only of Christ; and 
this again to faith in His redemption only ; and this redemp- 
tion again to His mere sufferings ; and this faith again to a 
single act which casts the soul on Christ once for all, and for 
ever. 

XXXV. I have repudiated my old faith, because, in no 
small degree, it reduces the great conflict of life, and the life- 
long sorrows of repentance, to the " strivings" of an hour or 
a night in a camp-meeting or a revival ; and so defines the 
mighty office of repentance, as to overlook the essential 

48 



566 



LOOKING FOE THE CHURCH. 



element of reparation to the injured, and restoration to the 
robbed and wronged. 

XXXVI. This faith moreover has latterly reduced prac- 
tical conversion to phenomena which nervous sympathy, sick- 
ness, opiates, deliriums, not unfrequently produce ; which can 
be produced in most instances with ease upon the deathbed \ 
and which have thus become a chief stumbling-stone in the 
way of men's salvation. The great object of life and of 
life-long agony seems forgotten, the formation of character 
— CHARACTER fitted for the seats and the circles of 
HEAVEN! — Heaven! an atmosphere pure enough for 
God and the Lamb to breathe! How vast must be the 
discipline that shall fit a soul for heaven! The slightest 
whisper of your busy-body or your " converted " slanderer, 
would silence every harp and break every heart in heaven ! 

XXXVTT. This was another cause of my dissatisfaction; 
that, to a sad extent, the cultivation of the social virtues was 
overlooked, as though conversion were a discharge in full of 
all other obligations. So bare is this fact to men's eyes, that 
they express it in proverbs. Who has not noticed with what 
melancholy uniformity disputations, strifes, jealousies, gossip- 
ings, and broad censoriousness, follow a revival % " No roads 
so rough as those newly mended ; no sinners so intolerable," 
says the world, " as those just turned saints." " Saints in the 
parlor," says the Avorld, " and furies in the kitchen." " Moral " 
teaching is avowedly discarded ; and the tongue, the temper, 
and the passions, are left to their own way and sway. Who 
can wonder at the result % Milton thought, " there had never 
been a more ignominious and mortal wound, to faith, to 
piety, to reformation, nor more cause of blasphemy given 
to the enemy, since the first preaching of Reformation." 
Another thought, that " Instead of a Reformation they had a 
Deformation of religion." And so it went on to the days of 
Edwards, who confessed, after a long and world-renowned 



RETROSPECT. 



567 



revival, that, "If envy, strife, variance, emulations, wrath, 
worldliness, selfishness, be badges of the Christian, we have 
Christians among us in abundance." It has been always so. 
So is it still. 

XXXVIII. I have discarded a religion that produces con- 
stantly distempered frenzies, and has settled thousands of its 
followers into irretrievable melancholy, and has prompted to 
many a mournful suicide. 

XXXIX. I have repudiated the whole Puritan system, be- 
cause it compelled me to judge my brother. And unless a 
brother could say my shibboleth, and talk my talk, I branded 
and disowned him. Each member of the family allowed to 
choose who shall be his brothers and sisters, where is charity ? 
Charity, like faith and hope, begins where doubt begins. But 
this snarling system, in the Church and out of it, when doubt 
begins, sets up its cry. This concision and excision I have 
done with. The wheat and the tares, the good fishes and the 
bad, I can now leave together, for a merciful God to send His 
rain upon them both. There are "branches^ Christ" that 
" bear no fruit." It is the Husbandman's place, not mine — 
and His not yet — to cast them into the fire. 

XL. The most painful part, in my experience of Dissent, 
was the lone conspicuity it gave me as a preacher. In 
Scripture I read that when men " went up to the temple," it 
. was " to pray ;" and when " the disciples came together," 
though St. Paul was to be there, it was " to break bread," 
" to pray," " to eat the Lord's Supper." / went to the 
temple to preach, as others came to hear. I saw beneath its 
roof no sign of the Son of man — no altar, no place of 
prayer, no emblem of alms and offerings, no memento of 
redemption, no glowing litanies for a blazing shield between 
the people and the preacher. He was the all in all. I was 
to be the grand Llama of the day. I went into the pulpit, 
feeling that I could creep into the earth : I came out of it, 
feeling that I could there find room among the ants. 



568 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



XLI. And with what kind of preaching has sectarism 
flooded the land ! I have heard schismatics reason, that the 
ignorance of their ministry was the proof of their inspiration. 
Did you ever hear them preach, by their tribes and by their 
companies 1 Did you ever hear a Mormon sermon % Did 
you ever sit before one of the two thousand elegantly 
decorated pulpits, where you might hear the redemption 
of the world by God our Saviour denied ? Did you ever sit 
before one of the fifteen hundred preachers among us, who 
deny the sin and the punishment from which that Saviour 
came to redeem us % Have you ever heard — but the time 
would fail me. Glorious pulpit ! Manufacturer of religions 
made palatable to the tastes of all ! Presbytery ! thou in 
thy genealogies art the true and lineal parent of all these, of 
more, and of more to come ! 

XLU. I have repudiated my old religion, because it is 
solely and wholly responsible for all the humiliation and 
dishonour done to pulpit as well as altar, in the fanaticism 
that disgraces and degrades thousands of neighbourhoods 
throughout the country. Only those familiar with the facts 
could know their nature and extent ; others would not 
believe : — gestures, rollings, tossings, tumblings, shoutings, 
faintings, screamings, in confusion inextricable. Doctor 
Potts tells us, that the call to the ministry consists in an 
inward moving of the Spirit, the sanction of the congregation, 
and the Lord's seal in the conversion of souls — a triple test 
in which the wandering Mormon and Deistic Campbellite 
claim to excel you all — a test all fanatics who count their 
followers submit to ; but one in which the preaching of the 
Lord of Glory would seem to suffer by the contrast. Yet it 
is written, as did Aaron, " So also Christ glorified not 
himself to be made an high priest ; but He that said unto 
him, ' Thou art my Son.' " Thirty long years His soul, with 
all the burnings of eternity upon it, waited until the 



RETROSPECT. 



569 



anointing of John, and the Voice from Heaven, called Him to 
His task. 

XL1II. My religion, consequently, could never have 
assured me that I had received any sacrament, or had heard 
the Gospel from any true minister. As the Romanist holds 
that the validity of a sacrament depends upon the intention 
of the priest : so schism maintains that it has been adminis- 
tered by no true minister, unless he be truly a converted 
man, called by the Spirit of God. Doctor Potts says, a 
minister is no minister, unless he have " the spiritual suc- 
cession." How, in this world, then, am I to know whether I 
have ever been baptized, have ever received the communion, 
have ever heard the Gospel from a lawful minister 1 The 
Baptists complicate the difficulty, by making baptism 
dependent on the regeneration or animus of the subject, 
Who, then, is baptized % Who is a brother % On every 
hand suspicion, in pulpit and in pew, must reign in the home 
of charity. 

XLIV. My old religion teaches that three or four good 
laymen may come and lay their hands upon my pious boot- 
black, and make him as true a minister of Jesus Christ as 
myself ; equal in dignity, and right, and power. How was it 
possible that a religion like this could have ever given me, in 
its highest reaches, that exalted and inspiring apprehension 
of the tremendous calling which now I feel, as one clothed 
with the authority of the universal Church, to proclaim her 
universal faith, without a " perhaps" or an " if," or doubt or 
contradiction ; and " as the minister of Christ and steward of 
His mysteries," to imitate His mighty act in heaven, and, in 
a figure appointed by Himself, to offer up the one, pure, only, 
everlasting sacrifice for sin, pleading sinlessly and gloriously 
upon our thousand altars 1 

XLV. And I regard it as no small thing to have recovered 
the ancient Episcopacy — the chaff that protects the seed, 



570 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



the shell that protects the kernel, the casket that keeps the 
crown-jewels of our Lord — true by the external demonstrations 
of history, analogy, universality ; true by its unity, its never 
altered faith, its perpetuity, and its power of self-recovery ; 
proven, as no other fact but those in Christianity are proven; 
so demonstrated that, even without the Church, ripe scholars 
have given it their assent, and a yearning, almost national, 
has been sometimes felt in parts of Europe for its recovery. 

XLVI. I find it delightful, too, to be satisfied regarding 
one's ordination, especially as introducing to a priesthood 
and service, of which schism has lost the memory. Doctor 
Adam Clarke, the Methodist commentator, shortly before his 
death, said, " I preach, and have long preached, without any 
kind of Episcopal ordination. I would greatly have preferred 
the hands of a Bishop ; even now, at this age of comparative 
decrepitude, i" would rejoice to have that ordination" The 
man is living in Maryland, who remembers the wide excite- 
ment among the Methodists, occasioned by the first baptism 
of an infant by one of their preachers. No man in England 
was more indignant than Mr. Wesley, at hearing that some 
of his preachers had undertaken to baptize ; he likened them, 
in an earnest, public discourse, to Korah and his company. 
About this time, he made application to a Bishop of Crete, 
who was then in England, to ordain his " preachers," and, it 
is also said, to consecrate himself a Bishop. But the scruples 
of the good Bishop concerning the ancient canons, prevented 
him. Twenty years afterward, when in his dotage, he laid 
his hands on Doctor Coke, and made him Bishop of the Meth- 
odists in America. Wesley's own brother, on this occasion, 
wrote a brief satire on the affair, whereof a portion runneth 
thus : 

"So easily are Bishops made, 
By man's or woman's whim; 
Wesley his hands on Coke hath laid, 
But who laid hands on Mm?" 



RETROSPECT. 



571 



But Doctor Coke was not satisfied. He wanted a line from 
Christ, not from himself. It was the old hiatus valde 
deflendus. Accordingly he proposed to Bishops Seabury and 
White the consecration of himself and Mr. Asbury as 
Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church ; and, on certain 
conditions, the re-ordination of their " preachers." Failing in 
this, he returned to England ; and in 1813, when he had 
now been " Bishop" twenty-nine years, he wrote an humble 
letter to the late Hon. "William Wilberforce, offering to 
"return most fully and faithfully to the bosom of the Church" 
if he might himself be consecrated Bishop of India ! These 
may be taken as conspicuous examples of that dissatisfaction 
with their ordination, which pervades extensively the min- 
isters of schism, and which is turning the thoughts of not a 
few toward the Church. I have said " three hundred" within 
a few years ; but I have received, in several letters, the 
advice to make my signature " One of Five Hundred." 
Many old-fashioned Presbyterians look at their ordination as 
far corrupted by the Congregational influx. How agreeable, 
therefore, to have done with all this misgiving, and to be 
satisfied with, one's ordination ! I am satisfied with mine t 
It is Congregational ; for it was done in the presence and with 
the approbation of "the Brethren." It is Presbyterian ; for 
Presbyters, together with the Bishop, laid hands upon me. 
It is Episcopal ; for it was done by the Bishop himself. It 
is Papal, if you please ; for, under Elizabeth, the Pope 
acknowledged our Orders, and offered to receive us as we 

were, if we would allow his jurisdiction. 

******* 

But enough, and more than enough ! My heart is sick, my 
hand is weary with the lengthening catalogue. The conflict 
is over : it is useless further to recall the particulars of the 
strife. Let us hasten to the end. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 



THE CHURCH FOUND. 



The rest of the story may be soon told. A voyage I 
would not make again for a universe of gold was now at an 
end. I would not be again among those rocks, again upon 
those shoals which reason is allowed to fathom, again in those 
currents that glide rapidly but imperceptibly along, again 
perilled in those collisions with barks as well-constructed and 
well-manned as mine, again lost in the ice of chilling specula- 
tion, again circling in the verge of the German maelstrom, 
again steering by the lights of wandering stars, again trusting 
to the reckonings of my private judgment for my place and 
bearings, again in the vessel which had been split in a hun- 
dred storms, and had lent its fragments to be reconstructed 
into things more frail and perishable still — again in such a 
bark, on such a sea, at such a time, for all the wealth omnipo- 
tence could create. On this sea I was born ; but the voyage 
was now over. Land spread out its wide, bright coasts before 
me. Land ! Land ! Columbus and his men knew nothing 
of the joy ! And I had now but to leap from a sea of uncer- 
tainty, and division, and chaos, and change, upon the terra 
jirma of unities and harmonies, of certainties and perpetuities. 

But duties involving principles and results of any mag- 
nitude, are nearly always, in Christian experience, embar- 
rassed with influences seemingly intended to delay or defeat 



THE CHUECH FOUND. 



573 



their accomplishment; although, in fact, only permitted to 
confirm the genuineness of a true and earnest conviction. So 
it was in the present instance. Considerations innumerable 
now sought a final hearing, to hold me back from acting under 
the light which God had been pleased to throw into my path. 
It was a conflict I cannot describe. I only know it was ter- 
rific. I can hardly imagine that it would have cost him, who 
boasted that he would, alone, overthrow the religion that it 
required twelve men to establish ; or him, who labored to 
impose upon the world the sophism that no amount of testi- 
mony could establish the truth of a miracle ; a greater sacrifice 
of intellectual pride, to have made, with the Ephesians, a 
bonfire of his books, and to have done homage to the ma- 
jesty of revelation : than it cost me to publish my adhesion 
to the faith which I had pitied as superannuated, by virtue 
of the very antiquity of which it boasted ; and which I had 
despised for its unaccommodating temper, by virtue of the 
petrified, unbending form in which it gloried as the perpetual 
representative of " the everlasting gospel." Fast as my hours 
went by, reasons on reasons crowded to my thoughts, why it 
would be better to abandon, or at least delay, the final step. 
The fountains of the deep within me were broken up, and the 
billows went over my soul. But He, whose goodness is 
equal to His power, comforted my heart, as He covered my 
head, in the day of battle. 

Something called " flesh and blood " said in my ear, " The 
mother that bare thee fell asleep, after a blameless life, in 
the assurance of a blessed resurrection : and thou wouldst cast 
dishonor on her dust, and suspicion on her faith !" Not so, I 
said ; I have not seen so great faith, no, not in Israel. But if 
Catholicity be true, the dead know it ;. and my departed ones 
behold it in the order of the heavenly hierarchies, and the 
unities and harmonies of the material and moral universe ; 
and it is joining myself again to their company, to embrace 

48* 



574 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



the convictions that they have reached, and the hierarchy on 
the earth ordained first in the Mosaic tabernacle " after the 
pattern of the heavenly" 

" Go," said this voice again, " go first, and bury thy father, 
and do not, by abandoning his faith, bring down his grey 
hairs with sorrow to the grave." I do not abandon his faith, 
I said, but the securities on which it rests I abandon ; for, 
although my father has stood so far from the precipice as 
hardly to discern it, yet a thousand thousand of his brethren 
have ventured to the verge and fallen. No, I abandon not 
the faith of my fathers ; but the schism that has been almost 
everywhere fatal to that faith, I abandon and abhor. I do 
not abandon that faith ; but where that faith has turned 
to reason, and is no more faith, I give it to the winds. I 
do not abandon that faith ; but the vacancies around it and 
the sands beneath it, I replace and fill with the foundations 
and proportions of antiquity. " You are about," said a private 
letter from an eminent divine well known to the Episcopal 
church, " You are about to unchurch and give over to a sort 
of surreptitious, left-handed mercy of God, your father, your 
former brethren, and the largest portion of Protestant Christen- 
dom." The very day this letter was received, my venerable 
father, three hundred miles away, wrote in a letter intended 

for my eye, " With regard to 's removal to another 

branch of Christ's Church, it has no objection from me, but 
on the contrary my cordial acquiescence ; as I trust and believe 
he is acting in the matter according to his best judgment, and 
the dictates of his conscience ; and I sincerely pray that he 
may be eminently useful in the new ecclesiastical connection." 

" But why," said a strong man armed who came to me, 
" why do you leave a body which even scribes and priests of 
Episcopacy acknowledge, with a slight qualification, to be a 
true branch of Christ's Church?" I answered, "If Esau de- 
spise his birthright, then shall I be the Jacob to inherit his 



THE CHURCH FOUND. 



575 



blessing ; and if the children loathe their bread, then shall I 
be the dog to eat the crumbs from their table." 

Besides the great and real conflict that was passing within 
me, one, who loved me once, suggested that it could not 
surely be the gewgaws of a ritual worship that had drawn 
me over. Even the letter from the divine who expressed his 
solicitude for my father's fate, acknowledged— " If your change 
were a mere matter of taste, a mere preference for forms and 
robes, &c, &c, while I might lament over the weakness which 
such a change would betray, I would be far from charging it 
with the arrogance and heresy of the fashionable high-church, 
papistical Oxfordisms of the day." 

Another, who was my fellow and my friend, was afraid 
that some in the church would suspect me of having left my 
" evangelicalism " behind me, and others of having brought 
my puritanism with me, and that, between the fires, I should 
be subjected to a roasting. And to another who hoped, with 
a patronizing air, that I would not be a high-churchman, I 
said, If I be a churchman at all, I must cease to be a Puritan ; 
I have been a high-church Presbyterian ; I shall probably be 
a high-church Episcopalian ; else why should I not continue 
as I am % Whatever system I embrace, I must hold it in its 
highest conservatism, as the truth and institution of Christ. 
To instance a single fact : — as a Presbyterian, I had many a 
time said, that I could never have been satisfied with Con- 
gregational ordination, nor did I ever allow a minister so 
ordained to aid me in the ministration of the sacraments, nor 
did I ever receive communion from a person so ordained; 
and it was the Congregational admixture, and consequent cor- 
ruption of a Presbyterian ordination (delivered, as I had held, 
by succession from the apostles) that first shook my confidence 
in Presbyterian orders in general, long before I doubted the 
validity of my own; for my own I could trace through a 
Presbyterial succession. 



576 



LOOKING FOE THE CHUBCH. 



And, yet once more, it was suggested by a friend, that I 
could not expect to reach, in the Episcopal Church, the posi- 
tion I had earned in the Presbyterian. I already occupied a 
post sufficiently lucrative. A new pastoral situation was 
offered rue, with emoluments not exceeded by any in the 
Presbyterian church. And yet another office, of Missionary 
supervision over the southern portion of the church, was within 
my reach ; and yet another, that would have given me easy 
duty, and opportunity of travel in every corner of Europe and 
the East, besides the probable acquisition of a post of repose 
and dignity in a literary institution. Some one of these pro- 
posals I should certainly have accepted, but for a sense of 
honor that would not suffer me to do so, until my mind 
should be settled on the questions that disturbed it. It was 
the same feeling that prevented my acceptance of a con- 
siderable sum of money, most kindly presented me during 
my above-mentioned illness, by my former companion and 
brethren. Things such as these I should long ago have for- 
gotten, except that I know there are minds weak enough and 
censorious enough (for the two infirmities go commonly 
together) to suppose that loaves and fishes can influence the 
faith of a truth-loving mind. As a Presbyterian, I was never 
in the receipt of less than two thousand a year ; as a Church- 
man, I have been sometimes content with four hundred, and 
have never sought or desired emolument or power. 

Meanwhile the truth was mighty. Magna est Veritas had 
been, before, a rhetorical or philosophical flourish : but now I 
felt its power. Intellectual pride; hereditary prejudices; 
local and personal influences without number ; friends, foes, 
earth, time, fame, family, all were compelled to do it homage. 
I could no more arrest- the progress of conviction, than I could 
stay the marches of the sun in heaven. Having rid myself 
of all other relations and ties in the Presbyterian communion, 
that I might glide out of it as inoffensively as possible, I re- 



THE CHUKCH FOUND. 



577 



signed, last of all, my pastoral charge. The next day I was 
taken violently ill, and, through a dreary winter, lay, in the 
estimation of my friends, at the gates of death. And, with 
the opportunity thus given me to review the motives and dis- 
position with which I had prosecuted my inquiries, I desired 
to live, mainly that I might recant before the world the 
schism of which I had been guilty in rending the body of 
Christ. 

My prayer was heard. As soon as my yet feeble health 
would allow, 1 penned a letter to the moderator of my Pres- 
bytery, beginning thus : 

" Rev. and Dear Sir, 

" It is my desire, if it shall please God to count 
me worthy, to resume the duties of the ministry, in con- 
nection with the 'Protestant Episcopal Church.' The right 
of that church to embrace in her immediate communion all 
christians of Anglican descent at least, has been for many 
years the subject of my most earnest consideration; and, 
in conceding her pretensions on this point as supported by 
Scripture and by Ancient Authors, I have not yielded to my 
convictions until they were mature, and could no longer 
with a safe conscience be set aside. I have rather labored 
to rid myself of them, by allowing undue influence to former 
prejudices, as well as by the more lawful expedient of con- 
sulting largely the soundest and most esteemed authorities 
upon the other side. But, after having over and over sifted 
my convictions, and the motives with winch I had either 
cherished or repressed them, in the light of another world, 
as I lay for many months at the door of death, I cannot 
now approve the timidity which held me back ; and have 
resolved to lay the sacrifice of whatever it may cost me, (and 
only He who made the heart can know what it has already 
cost me,) at the feet of Him whose great sacrifice alone can 



578 



LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH. 



make any of our offerings accepted. It would be a departure 

from the respect which I owe to the body over which you 

preside — in which there are fathers as much beyond me in 

years, as they are beyond me in the attainments of piety — to 

state the reasonings that have led me to these conclusions ; 

but I may be allowed to add, that I have studiously chosen, 

as the most suitable moment for making the change, one that 

should hazard no interest of Presbyterianism, however small, 

confided to my hands, in the pastoral relation, or in any other 

official tie whatever 

" With great respect for the body over which you have the 

honor to preside, and with assurances of personal esteem and 

affection for every member of it individually, I remain, Rev. 

and Dear Sir, 

" Yours, in the grace of the Lord Jesus, 

u » 



On the receipt of the foregoing, the Presbytery appointed 
a committee of its most distinguished members to confer with 
me upon the subject. The matter was conducted with a 
courtesy and kindness as honorable to themselves as they 
were grateful to my own feelings. The interview soon satisfied 
them that my convictions were not likely to be shaken, and, 
I must also betieve, that my intentions were pure. On their 
report to the Presbytery, the following minute was adopted, 
and transmitted to me with a kind letter from my old friend 
the clerk : " Whereas, it is satisfactorily ascertained that the 

Rev. has made application for ordination to the Bishop 

of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of , 

and has thereby implicitly, as otherwise explicitly, renounced 
his ordination as a Presbyterian minister, and withdrawn from 
the jurisdiction of this Presbytery ; therefore 

" Resolved, That the name of Mr. be stricken from 

the roll of this Presbytery. 



THE CHURCH FOUND. 



579 



" Resolved, That a copy of this minute be transmitted to 
Mr. ." 

In this quiet result I was more fortunate than the Rev. 
Messrs. Leach and Richie, who were deposed, by the Pres- 
bytery of Toronto, for returning to the Church of England in 
1843 ; as, in having with impunity had my children baptized 
some time before in the same church, for motives stated in 
the beginning of this narrative, I was more fortunate than a 
clergyman in the Scottish kirk, who about the same time was 
degraded from his office for the same offence. 

Thus terminated, as pleasantly as the case would allow, 
with a due regard to christian courtesy, an intercourse which 
had always been agreeable and friendly, and which could 
have been brought to a close by nothing under the wide 
heaven but that voice in the breast, which never commands 
except to be obeyed. My venerable father, knowing that a 
long illness had exhausted my resources, gave me imme- 
diately an earnest invitation to come with my children, and 
make my home with him, until I should take Holy Orders, 
and obtain the means of living in the Church which I was 
entering. And in this, once more, I was more fortunate than 
the sons of a distinguished Presbyterian divine, who were 
parishioners of mine, and dwelt with me in the same house, 
whose father refused to support them (although yet but boys) 
so long as they should persist in their purpose to return to 
the Ancient Church and take Orders at her Altar. 

I was kindly received by ohe Bishop and clergy in my new 
relations, and after the customary probation, one who had 
pretended to be a successor of Peter and Paul, and to be the 
Bisnop of street church, (phraseology unknown to an- 
tiquity,) was admitted, in company with two other Presby- 
terian ministers, into the humble order of Saint Stephen. 

Never, for the briefest instant that time could mark, have 
I desired to return, or regretted the step I have taken. " My 



4 



580 LOOKING- FOR THE CHURCH. 



heart is fixed: O God, my heart is fixed." I breathe the 
free, bright, sparkling atmosphere of the purest antiquity. I 
live again in the times of Irenasus, Ignatius, and Saint Paul. 
I am held by a line of a thousand links going back to the 
Cross. I am a member of the Body in which the Faith has 
lived from the beginning until now ; and, with no measured 
satisfaction, I can join the cry of ten thousand times ten 
thousand, and thousands of thousands, in which the voices of 
Three Hundred can be scarcely heard, " We have found it ! 
we have found it !" and while we live, the joyful Eureka and 
the adoring Alleluia shall go up together ! 

ONE OF THREE HUNDRED. 



THE END. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CONFLICT. 

The Writer once a Presbyterian — Churchmen not presenters— Change of mind 
gradual— Uncharitahleness— Foundations must be laid deep— Earnest and 
honest, though slow — The pain involved in the change — Consequent enthu- 
siasm—One of three hundred. Pp. 5-12. 

CHAPTER II. 

TRADITION. 

Mother and Father— Filial obedience— The religion received by tradition not to 
fee lightly changed — Tradition makes up the bulk of our knowledge, secular as 
well as spiritual— Tradition the very life of all the Sects— Tradition among 
Quakers, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, &c. — Tradition universal— Pro- 
viding a Faith for Children — Children baptized in the Church seven years 
before the Author entered it himself — His change not the result of caprice or 
blind or sudden impulse— Conscience — The Parent envying his children's 
iot. Pp. 13-23. 

CHAPTER III. 

APOLOGY. 

Princeton— Church Liturgy had then never been heard within a circuit of thirty 
miles — Implicit faith — Doubts on Infant Baptism settled — Baptismal Regener- 
ation — Never saw a line in favor of Episcopacy — The Church regarded with 
almost silent contempt — Barley-cake in the camp — Episcopacy despatched at 
Princeton in three days — No intention of reverting to it afterwards — Revivals 
and Controversies — Honest Ignorance — Reproaches on Churchmen once dis- 
senters—Bishop De Lancey's statement in regard to Romish perverts— Causes 
of the dissatisfaction of Converts— Their natural enthusiasm— Advantage of 
Church training— Defective sectarian training— Rarely remedied— Obstacles 
to entrance into the Church ministry—" Remain where they are"— The Church 
should adopt a liberal policy— Caste— Presbyterians inundated by Congrega- 
tionalists— " Revolutionizing" the Church— Aims and duties of the Church. 
Pp. 24-39. 



iv 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PBHfCEXOH. 

First meeting with a Clergyman of the Church, who had come from without— Debut 
as a Presbyterian preacher — Reliance on the Lecturer's facts — Syllogism — 
NUMBER ONE, Anti-republican— NUMBER TWO, the words Bishop and Pres- 
byter in the New Testament— NUMBER THREE, Apostles but Twelve ; miracles, 
inspiration, &c. — NUMBER FOUR, Hilary, Jerome, Augustine— Traditional 
Presbyterianism — Depressed state of the Church in America — Colonial hatred of 
the Church — Obstinate refusal of Bishops to America — Reasons for it — Dr. Mur- 
ray nominated— Bishop Seabury — ' ; Among the least of the tribes of Israel" — 
u Born in a manger, and ought to be kept there" — Churchmen in the Revolution, 
Washington and White — Power of the Church in England — ''Not one word of 
His creating Bishops" — Comparative estimates of Presbytery and Episcopacy on 
the Princeton hypotheses — Thunder and lightning — Pulpit exhibitions of 
learning and loudness— A low-church Episcopal Clergyman balancing among 
sectarian revivals, and what they thought of him — " Better fire that canon off!" 
— "Famous Jerome," and the first three centuries. Pp. 40-50. 

CHAPTER V. 

ABUSES AST) DISUSE OF BAPTISM. 
Unwarrantable evils coextensive with the system must be radical— Restriction of 
Baptism — Unwritten tradition stronger than the written — Facts — Baptism of 
Infants among the Presbyterians, one to twenty-five— In the Church, one to 
five — Phillips, Sp-ing, Potts, Smith, Boardmau — St. George's — Private Baptism 
of Infants among the Presbyterians — Sister's children — The Song of Babes- 
Fit for Heaven, fit for Baptism— Elect Infants — Which is liberal? — Ad cap- 
tandum — Predestination — The doctrine of the Presbyterian Confession of Faith 
— Ask bread, and give a stone — Presbyterians becoming Baptists or Churchmen 
—Parallel between "Westminster and Trent— Feed my lambs— Pelagianism 
thrives in Presbyterian soil — A Presbyterian mother seeing no use in Bap- 
tizing her dying infant — Dr. Alexander on Baptismal Regeneration — The 
Doctrine lost among Presbyterians— Semi-Baptist already— Baptism without 
Regeneration, not a Sacrament, and not worth retaining — Presbyterians, 
Quakers — Spirituality — Presbyterianism in other countries controlled by the 
State : here, free — Universal Redemption — Baptism reason enough for the 
change from Presbytery to the Church— Two Baptisms— Intention of the 
Parent essential— Difficulties— Dilemma— Go back to the standards— White 
Communion and white Baptism— Presbyterian parallel to the Papist. Pp. 51-71. 

CHAPTER VI. 
sacrame>t:3. 

Window behind the Presbyterian pulpit— Oxford men altering the Bible — The 
four beasts— Presbyterian Elder lamenting over the Oxfordism and Popery in 
the Westminster Confession— The fidgets— Waiting for an explanation— De- 
parture from old standards— Recollections and remembrances of Baptism — 



CONTENTS. 



V 



No such thing among Presbyterians— New wine would burst the old bottles- 
New measures to recruit numbers — Ictus from beyond the fixed stars— Re- 
vivalism — Repeated conversions once for all — One hundred and forty commu- 
nicants missing, out of five hundred— Campbellites, or SoCinian Baptists, great 
Revivalists— Heathenism and Demon-worship— No one has ever suggested a 
restoration of the Sacraments— Baptism statnominis umbra — Eucharist a mere 
commemoration — The Presbyterian Sacraments only dead forms, or mere rites, 
entirely unnecessary to salvation. Pp. 72-85. 

CHAPTER VII. 

CONFIRMATION THE LORD'S SUPPER EXCOMMUNICATION. 

Appointed time for irresistible grace — Profession of Religion by taking the Sacra- 
ment — Relating experience to the Elders or the Congregation — Elders made 
when timber was scarce — Inquisitorial conclave — Going before the Session 
deters from Communion. — Converts troubled before it, and light-hearted after 
it — Class-meeting — Prying into private histories — A fence ten rails high 
around the Sacramental Table — Impertinent questions — Tyrannical vows ex- 
acted — Rome comparatively free — Questions to be answered before the Con- 
gregation — Innovation in this matter — "Want of connecting link between 
Baptism and the Communion — Confirming in the Covenant — Need of Con- 
firmation — Luther, Calvin, Beza, Owen, Adam Clarke, &c. — Scripture proof for 
Confirmation — Part of the Foundation— First Principles— Miraculous gifts 
imparted by the laying on of hands — So was it with Ordination — Similar 
ordinance among the Jews— Through all the East — Confirmation of a daughter 
— Effect on her character — General effect, as contrasted with the Presbyterian 
plan — Why not re-baptize and re-immerse? — Familiarity and slovenliness of 
Presbyterian Communions — Receiving the elements in pews— Downward and 
still downward — Chilly and more chilly still— Christian reverence outraged — 
Kneeling — The Arian sat, the Pope sits, so do the Presbyterians— Harmonious 
working of the Church system — Excommunication — Delicacy set at defiance — 
Scandals aggravated by the Presbyterian system — Tyranny — Anathema and 
Absolution, according to Knox — Excommunicated out of one sect into another, 
in good and regular standing — Sixty thousand exscinded, and become forth- 
with anew "Church" — Private judgment — All equally valid. Pp. 86-103. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

LITURGIES. 

Symmetry and beauty cannot exist in a body without life — Lip-service and 
Episcopacy convertible terms — Great names in favour of a Liturgy — Eu- 
logium of Mr. Barnes— JV. Y. Christian Observer — John Cummings — Dr. 
Doddridge— Dr. Clarke— Robert Hall— Baxter— Baxter's and "Wesley's Litur- 
gies—Watson—The Princeton Review — Prayer Book unknown — Dissenting 
Liturgies — Prayer Book to the Presbyterian is like the Bible to the Papist — 
Preaching and worship — Thorough change cannot be sudden — Well enough 
for the childish and illiterate— Nineteen twentieths of the Prayer Book taken 
from the Bible— Ignorance of the Church service in boyhood— Finding the 
places and responding— Gaining upon the heart— Kneeling or standing in 



VI 



CONTENTS, 



prayer? — Kneeling at Revivals — Indecency of sitting — The system incapable of 
producing reverence which amounts to worship — " The question of posture in 
prayer has begun to interest the Christian public''' — Secret attendance on the 
■w orship of the Church — Back to inanity and husks — Yearnings for a Liturgy 
in Scotland — And in this country— Regrets — Disgusts at extemporary prayers 
—The Boston Recorder on the faults of public prayers— 1. Doctrinal— 2. His- 
torical— 3. Hortatory — 4. Denunciatory — 5. Personal— 6i Eloquent— 7. Fa- 
miliar— 8. Sectarian — 9. Long — Completion of the catalogue— 10. Self- 
laudatory — 11. Un-English — 12. Short — 13. Blundering — 14. Verbose — 
15. Eccentric — 16. Unforgiving — 17. Defective — 18. Common-place— 19. In- 
tellectual — 20. Theatrical — 21. Bombastic— 22, Declamatory — 23. Objurgatory 
—24. Inaccurate— 25. Presumptuous— 26. Political— Regulator wanting— Not 
one of all these applies to the Liturgy of the Church — Its complete comprehen- 
siveness — Analysis of the daily Morning Prayer — Influence of the Liturgy on 
the preaching— And on the people — Receiving the Holy Communion while 
yet a Presbyterian Clergyman, from "Catholic" feeling — Presbyterian Com- 
munion in the afternoon — The Communion Office of the Church — No restraint 
upon liberty — li Our Father" — Private forms — Effort— Effect of repetition in 
a Revival — Old hymns and old tunes best — New hymns and tunes daily would 
kill a Revival — Association — Homage paid to the Church by the Revival 
system — Princeton Review sound on tunes— A fortiori — Missionary hymn — 
Fixed channels best— Ancient Temple Service liturgical — Service of the 
Primitive Church — Of Heaven — Princeton Review sound on musical instru- 
ments — Carry out the argument— Princeton Review sound on psalm-singing — 
No such thing as congregational extemporary prayers— The Scriptural argu- 
ment—Usage of the Church in all countries and ages— Ancient Liturgies— 
The Synagogue — Liturgy not tiresome— Worship by proxy — " My house the 
house of preaching .'" — The Lord's Prayer intolerable — Effect of Church 
Service on the casual attendant — Disgust growing stronger — An ideal Presby- 
terian—Destiny always to lose, never to recover— To reason, not to believe— 
Private judgment, progress, development. Pp. 104-141. 

CHAPTER IX. 

DOWNWARD TENDENCIES. 

Evils inherent in the system — Departures from the faith — Theory severe and 
strict — Unceasing cutting off, and going off— Severe creeds also — Predestina- 
tion the root of incalculable mischief — "Whole theory human — Hair-splittings 
—Grim caricature of the truth— Presbyterian and Papist agree— Infidelity fol- 
lows both — Westminster Confession began the change for the better — Insufficient 
in any one instance to protect and preserve inviolate the faith — Scottish Kirk. — 
Presbyterian Churches in England — Out of two hundred and sixty, two hundred 
and forty are Unitarian— Every Presbyterian Chapel in London, Socinian— 
Ireland, generally Unitarian or Arian— American Presbytery the daughter of 
the Irish — French Protestants fallen — Of six hundred clergy, not ten to believe 
the Deity of Christ— Partial Revival, from English influence— Switzerland ; 
Rousseau remembered, Calvin forgotten — Doctrine of Servetus supplanted that 
of his executioner — Only one clergyman suspected of believing the Deity of 
Christ— Malan hooted for declaring the faith— Sacramental abuses in Geneva 



CONTENTS. 



vii 



— Dr. Potts himself unchurched the Church of Switzerland at Geneva — German 
Protestants — Spurious Bishops or Superintendents — Not one to believe in the 
eternal punishment of the wicked — Neander — Blasphemous parody of Bap- 
tism—The Bible as unknown as before Luther's days, except for the British- 
German Evangelicalism takes wonderful liberties with the Sacred Canon — 
Sweden Episcopal and Orthodox — The Church of England untouched by the 
universal plague of Presbytery — The Bulwark of the Reformation — The May- 
flower — Leper white as snow — Recovery through Episcopal Whitfield — So- 
cinianism rampant— Prophecies of Mather and Edwards — Universal ists have 
gained a thousand preachers in a few years — Descendants of Mather and 
Cromwell are in the Church ; of Luther, have gone to Rome — Doom of Ortho- 
doxy sealed in New England — Andover going over — Growth of the Church in 
Connecticut — Newburyport — Socinianism the semper, ubique, et ab omnibus 
of Presbyterianism — Horrible blasphemies that are the ultimate result — Down- 
ward tendencies of even Old School Presbyterians — Schisms and Controversies 
— Germanism — Chain of joined hands from Calvin to Atheism — No contest 
for mere forms and shadows — High time to know better — The Church Universal 
faithful in adoring JESUS— The undying worm nurtured in the heart of Presby- 
terianism — Milton — "Watts— The Light of Reason— The Primitive Church — 
Want of Episcopacy and a Liturgy — The gates of Hell have prevailed against 
the Presbyterian Communion— Only two outposts remain to be taken— "Who is 
the Anti-Christ? — "Have you heard the dreadful news?" — Thirty millions — 
Theologia pectoris — Famishing — Presbyterianism not the Rock-founded Church 
— Gleamings of the morning. Pp. 142-177. 

CHAPTER X. 

A DREAM. 

The Vis a tergo — Conscious effort to maintain a balance — No arrest till the bottom 
is reached — Change — Admiration of German Exegesis — Ecclesiastical systems 
Episcopal or Presbyterian — Of Episcopal none deny the Deity of Christ, Re- 
demption, the operation of the Holy Ghost — Of Presbyterian, many thousands 
— Socinianism follows Presbyterianism — Dreams — Dream of Frederick of 
Saxony — Puritan Dreams- and Popish Dreams — Religious Experience — The 
Dream — Babylon — The Image Eureka— Gathering of Gog and Magog — The 
Man appears— He is questioned who he is— Speech of the Old Man that he is 
God — Speech of the Young Man that he is no God — Protestants agree to 
the negative — Jesus to be worshipped as God no more — Old Man washes his 
hands — The wounds bleed afresh — The Angel descends with a woe — Path over 
the dried-up Euphrates to Jerusalem— Vision of the heavenly Jerusalem- 
Armies of the Catholics— Triple hierarchy— The tiara — The Song of Degrees 
—They all fall down and adore Him— Universal peace and rejoicing — The 
awaking and the wish. Pp. 181-205. 

CHAPTER XI. 

SCHISM. 

Radii of reasoning— No mathematical logic— Unity— Not all faults justify Schism 
— Description of a village on the borders of the Potomac — Sunset at Sea — 
Difficulty of Religion in the West — Difficulty of converting the heathen— 



Vlll 



CONTENTS. 



Enumeration of Sects — Little-Children Baptists — Glory-Alleluia Baptists- 
Episcopacy brought not one of these sects into the world — Presbytery the 
mother of them all — Infallibility of private judgment — Terms of salvation 
pared down to the minimum — Schism prolific — Episcopalians not the fathers 
of new sects — The divisions of Schism — Melancthon's prophecy of Anarchy 
or Erastianism without Bishops — Our Lord's prayer for Unity — Korab and his 
company — The old Faith and the old Church go together — Excuses for the fact 
of divisions — The Church an invisible body — Tested by Scripture and common 
sense — Schism an impossible sin — Charity an impossible virtue — Superior 
purity or piety no justification of Schism — Schism never tolerated in Scripture 
— Eetort as to the separation of the Church from Eome — Answer — What the 
Church is — Vine and branches — Vineyard and fig-tree — Marriage guests — Ten 
Virgins — Family of Servants. — Wheat and Tares — Net— Bethesda— Shadows 
that do not satisfy — The Evangelical Alliance — Bible, Tract, and Sunday 
School Union Societies — Divide et impera — Broadway Tabernacle or Exeter 
Hall Unity — Live-for-evers — Platform unity — The Church, one and the samo 
— « Let us not rend it !" Pp. 206-232. 

CHAPTER XII. 

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 

What could the Continental Reformers do without Bishops ? — Wait — Presby- 
terians the next Schismatics after the Papists — Popery and Puritanism rose 
together as Schisms in England— Eesults of Puritanism in the Great Rebellion 
—Two hundred and thirty-five out of two hundred and fifty-eight Presbyterian 
Chapels now Unitarian — Schism the breach through which Popery comes in — 
The Church not bigoted nor intolerant — None of the six hundred alterations 
yet made — No distinguishing line can be drawn among various bodies of 
Schismatics — They must return — Downward progress of "Wesleyanism — Wes- 
ley's long opposition — Presbyterian opinion of Schism in 1643 — Platformists 
in the Broadway Tabernacle on the same subject— Premium on Schism— Indi- 
viduals the authors of sects— Individuals lost in the Church, the living Body— 
The true Mother will not see her child divided— The fathers of the Schism 
would abhor the results— Schismatics have returned to many of the things 
they denounced— Their descendants in the Church— The Church with the 
Faith— There is yet a Church on earth— The Church is one— No more two 
Bodies than two Heads— The downward current— Shrinking from the fiery 
trial. Pp. 233-251. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

A UNITY IMPOSSIBLE. 

No unity possible to come from the membra disjecta of Presbyterianism— Sour 
grapes— Illustration drawn from the resurrection of the body — Ancient Unity 
— The Primitive Church, if Presbyterian, accepted Episcopacy rather than vio- 
late Unity— If the Church shall ever again be one, it must be on the same 
ground as of old— Presbyterian may become Catholic without the sacrifice of 
principle— Presbyterian principles do not regard re-ordination as sacrilegious 
—The late abandonment of old Presbyterian principles will facilitate the return 



CONTENTS. 



is 



of many to tlie Church— The Church indebted to Dr. Potts— Also to the 
Princeton Review—The Church cannot become Presbyterian without the sacra- 
fice of principle — Impossible that the Westminster Confession should ever 
become universal — Calvinism not on the increase — Any creed, to be universal, 
must be simple — The Apostles' Creed short and simple — Trent and West- 
minster both are too long, too particular, too oppressive — Eome has made her 
experiment — Intellectually and morally a failure — Presbytery has tried it for 
three hundred years — A worse failure than the other — Neither its doctrinal 
purity or corporate unity retained — John Angell James on Sectarianism and 
the Evangelical Alliance — Papist and Presbyterian have both carried out de- 
velopment too far— They can give but an unanswered prayer and an unac- 
complished promise. Pp. 252-266. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

A UNITY POSSIBLE. 

Aspirations after Unity shown in Associations, Alliances, Societies, Anniversaries, 
Platforms, &c. — Blood of St. Januarius — Frederick's Grenadiers — Hollowness 
under the Platform — Truce not peace — Dissolving views — Camera obscura — 
Unions avoided in contending for Unity— The lost Atlantis — Unity must be 
visible, that the world may believe — Orders and Sacraments of the Church 
admitted both by Presbyterians and Eomanists to be valid — Both acknowledge 
the Creed of the Church, the Apostles' Creed, and the Nicene Creed — The 
Church never dared to alter the Creed, or add to it— Presbyterians and Papists 
make Creeds, the Church makes none — Her faith the only one that has been 
universal, the only one which ever can be again— "Within this enclosure Meth- 
odist, Calvinist, lmmersionist, &c, can all dwell in peace — The Church loveliest 
when her Creed was shortest— The Creed the great protector of the right of 
private judgment — In necessariis, unitas ; in dubiis, libertas ; in omnibus, 
caritas — Christian the name ; Catholic the surname — Status in quo ante bellum 
— Presbyterian bodies, as such, cannot return — There must be a falling away 
first— Presbyterianism is falling, has fallen, in nearly all lands— Antichrist- 
Gog and Magog— The Church the only shelter in that day. Pp. 267-279. 



CHAPTER XV. 

CATHOLICITY. 

A Chord endless in its vibrations— Conversion not to Episcopacy but to Cath- 
olicity— One-idea Episcopacy — Catholicity must be felt — Her secret can never 
be imparted — Dissenters beginning to find out there is something in Cath- 
olicity — Low Church Episcopacy unreasonable — The sentinel at the door — 
Protestant Episcopal — European Protestants ashamed of the name — Evan- 
gelical Alliance ashamed to take it — Protestant, in Germany, means Infidel — 
So also in France— D'Aubigne disclaims it — Protestantism is mere negation, 
lives only by antagonism — Episcopacy not the summum bonum — The Catholic 
religion — New heavens and a new earth. Pp. 280-288. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

ELDERS AND DEATH-BEDS. 

Bench of Elders, or Parochial Presbytery.— Clergy or laity ?— Ruling Elders unite 
in Ordination V— Ridden by one Bishop, or by fifteen — Elders ignorant of their 
own Confession — Little finger of Puritanism thieker than the loins of Prelacy — 
Lord Bishops and Lord Brethren — John Angell James on the Deacons— Lay 
tyrants — Melancthon on the intolerable tyranny there would be without 
Bishops— Mildness of Church government— Administration of sealing ordi- 
nances, now called rites — Dying Quaker refused Baptism by the Elders — De 
angendis morientibus — Baptism withheld from children at the point of death — 
Too much importance to a mere external — Superstition — Sending for an 
Episcopal Clergyman— The Viaticum. Pp. 289-297. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

POPULAR LIBERTY. 

The Church not unfriendly to human liberty— The bulwark of Republican. free- 
dom— No liberty where the Judiciary is not separated from the Legislative and 
Executive— Jefferson's definition of tyranny— Marshall— Constitutions of States 
— Washington's Farewell Address— The Church on the model of the Republic 
— Separation of powers in the Church — Essence of despotism found under the 
forms of Presbyterianism — The General Assembly is at once legislative, judi- 
ciary and executive, and no appeal — Methodists also — Laity no representation 
— Preachers supreme — Confessional and Class-meeting — Peter's pence — Sur- 
veillance inferior only to the Inquisition — Only the Jesuits surpass the Meth- 
odists in the centralization of power — Congregationalists — Tyranny again — 
Congregation is legislature, judge, jury, and executioner— A Churchman would 
not tolerate such tyranny for an hour— The Church alone is republican and 
free — Sixty thousand felt the tyranny of Presbyterianism at one blow— The 
brethren excluded from Presbyterian Synods— None but Elders for life are 
admitted— The Church alone allows laymen a representation— Presbyterianism 
anti-republican — Its legislature acts in one house — In the Church three 
branches, with mutual checks — Apostles, Elders, Brethren — Mixture of the 
liberal and the conservative — Reverence for authority — Dangers from the 
slavery agitation— The Church will not divide— The Chureh the safeguard of 
the Republic— Clay, Spencer, Kent, and Webster— Threefold order of Prelacy 
the safeguard of ancient Israel — Infidel virtues stolen from Christianity- 
Liberty sprung from Episcopacy— Episcopacy twin-sister of liberty. Pp. 298-310. 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

LIBERTY OF WORSHIP. 
Joyce Heth — The Documents — Pilgrim fathers in the " howling wilderness" — Not 
" civil and religious liberty," but domination, fisheries, trade, and entire prop- 
erty in the soil— Chief grievance in England, they were not allowed to perse- 
cute — Popery and Puritanism reach the same rebellious results from their 
presumed infallibility— Not "persecuted out of England" — Professed attach- 



CONTENTS. 



ment to the Church of England — Blind Homeric dinner-table rhapsodies — 
Joyce Heth not the nurse of General Washington — Not the persecution of Arch- 
bishop Laud—Cotton's Bloody Tenet— The documents — Brass kettle — Pilgrim 
"Legends" — Plymouth Rock — Glorious rock! — Rock of ages — Freedom of 
Conscience — Puritan floggings and imprisonments — Compulsory taxes and 
tithes — Stocks, cages, strippings, cart-tails, lashes, brandings, boring with hot 
iron, selling into slavery, hanging and leaving unburied — Cutting off of ears — 
Gallows — Martyrs to religious liberty, not Puritans— No such work in Eng- 
land — Persecution lasted 50 years longer in Massachusetts than in England — 
Quaker perished on the scaffold in 1661 — Testimony of Lord Brougham — 
Baptists persecuted until the Revolution — "The fault of the times" — This excuse 
gives up the claim of "freedom to worship God" — Not the fault of the times — 
Puritans behind the times — Puritans behind the Roman Catholics — Puritans 
out-persecute the Papists — The Episcopal Church of Scotland, persecuted until 
a late date. — Bishop Seabury — Maryland ahead of Massachusetts — Edward 
Everett on separation between Church and State — Church and State not sepa- 
rated in Massachusetts until 1834 — Judge Story's authority— Virginia in advance 
of New England — Intolerable rigour of the Puritan Establishment— Toleration 
denounced by Puritan preachers as a sin that would bring down the judgment 
of God on the land — Obstinate perseverance in intolerance — In 1676 five-sixths 
of the people disfranchised by Puritan intolerance — Reasons why Churchmen 
were not all forward in the Revolution — The Pilgrims not all Puritans — 
Churchmen not allowed to have an Organ till 1743 — Puritans prevented the 
Church from having Bishops— Franklin in regard to American Bishops— Wash- 
ington and White. Pp. 311-327. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

LIBERTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 

Levelling down religion to the meanest comprehension — The province of reason 
in Religion. Tradition about the LXX — Destructive intoxication of reason — 
Cyrus and Astyages — The Caliph of Bagdad — Variations of doctrine — Inter- 
ference with liberty — No slavery to believe the truth — Slavery of Presbyterian- 
ism — Freedom of the Church — Chains so long worn, they are no longer felt — 
Dislodged from Number One. Pp. 328 -339. 

CHAPTER XX. 

HYPOTHESES. 

Episcopacy not the only question at issue— Chaff to defend the growing grain — 
Church essential to the Faith, Episcopacy essential to the Church — At an early 
age Episcopacy confessed to be as universal as the Church itself — Succession 
traced back to the Apostles — No Presbyterian church to be found in the first 
four centuries any where in the world — The argument for the Deity of Christ 
the same as for Episcopacy — The Deity of Christ fiercely opposed ; Episcopacy 
never questioned — How to account for this phenomenon? — Hypotheses to ex- 
plain the fact — Not done by violence— Dead silence of all antiquity as to any 
change at all — England in the time of St. Augustine — Buchanan in the east — 
Dr. Wolff— Universality impossible if, at the death of St. John, the universal 



xii 



CONTENTS. 



Church was Presbyterian— Supposition that Presbyterianism was overthrown, 
must be followed up by another supposition to show how — Episcopalians stole 
it away while Presbyterians slept — Dr. Miller on Standing Moderators — Fertile 
imagination — Awkward facts — No better hypothesis ?— What would you have 
said? — Hypothesis lame in not accounting for the disappearance of the Ruling 
Elder, and the Deacons acquiring the right to preach and baptize — Necessita- 
te mother of invention — " Stole them away while we slept" — Sepulchre and 
stone stolen too — Credat Judceus — Ancient heretics never questioned the Epis- 
copacy—Baxter, Le Clerc, Bucer, Beza, Casaubon, Blondel, Luther, and Calvin, 
all give it up — Calvin's anathema of Dissenters.— Grotius gives up to " all the 
Fathers, without exception 1 ' — "Standing Moderators" could not stand — New 
supposition — All an afterthought— Will not do— Episcopacy alone never dis- 
puted — For the Presbyterian hypotheses can be found in all antiquity not one 
witness. Pp. 340-354, 

CHAPTER XXI. 

A FALSE ISSUE; OR, THE PHANTOM GIANT. 

Perish Episcopacy I — Whole circle of Evangelical truth is in controversy — Repudi- 
ation of Presbyterian Ordination — Abandonment of old ground— The people 
can originate a valid Ministry — Parallel between Korah and the Princeton Re- 
view — People choose their own religion, and then create a ministry to preach 
it — The Desert Island — Dr. Potta and Dr. Wainwright — Baptism with sand — 
Desert Island may furnish women for the ministry — Let the Desert Island 
alone — Face the question — Nine facts — Episcopacy the only theory that can 
harmonize them all — Another smooth stone from the brook at Princeton — 
Number Two: "Now conceded by all pious and learned Episcopalians that 
Bishop and Presbyter are of the same meaning in the New Testament" — Really 
supposed that this was the main point in dispute — Dr. Potts not yet out of the 
fog — Miserable sophism — All a phantom — Episcopalians never denied it — 
Change of names does not prove change of office — Jews changed Jehovah, in 
pronunciation, to The Lord — Weakens the evidence for the Deity of Christ — 
Apostles the rightful name of those whom we call Bishops — Bandying of 
words — Man of straw — First battle with the giant— A little foggy — A rf*al live 
giant. Pp. 355-374. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

THE TRUE ISSUE. 

Old Presbyterian doctrine of the Apostolic succession — Dr. Lathrop — Repudiated 
by Dr. Potts — Greek — Apostles proved, by the Greek, to be Deacons — The 
lower covered by the higher — Deacon never styled a Presbyter, nor a Presbyter 
called an Apostle — Official acts not confounded any more than official titles — 
Take back the move — New move in the opposite direction — The Apostles had 
Ti-o successors — Number Three : The Apostles were only Twelve, they saw the 
Lord, wrought signs and wonders, were individually inspired; their successors 
can pretend to none of all these — Devout women also saw the Lord — They also 
Apostles?— Many others spake with tongues — Were inspired, and prophesied— 
AH these Apostles? — Deacons and brethren worked miracles — These also 



CONTENTS. 



xiii 



Apostles? — Dr. Potts calls on Bishop Doane to prove his Apostleship hy drink- 
ing prussic acid — Tom Paine ditto — Irreverence and profanity on the plat- 
form — Signs shall also follow them that believe — The blaspheming infidel makes 
the same call on Dr. Potts — Use of miracles — Korah's punishment for rising 
against the Prelacy — The Church will not drink the poison of heresy — Miracles 
do not attend Deacons or Elders now, any more than Bishops — Dr. Snodgrass 
on The Twelve — Without successors — The promise " Unto the end of the 
world" — Not a link has failed — Analogy of the Bible— The works of Nature — 
The Apostolic claim always made and never gainsaid — Grotius again — Luther- 
ans and Methodists, artificial imitation — Argument from casual allusion in 
Scripture, stronger than positive declaration — Observance of Sunday, and 
Baptism of Infants — Official powers of the Apostles — Popery and Presbytery 
both fail to harmonize the phenomena on the face of Scripture — The Twelve — 
If one more than Twelve, the argument is gone — The first list, of the original 
Twelve — Characteristic precipitation of St. Peter — St. Matthias, the thirteenth 
Apostle — The charm broken — St. Paul — St. Barnabas — Fifteen — Why not fifteen 
hundred? — Andronicus and Junias — Epaphroditus — St. James — Nineteen — 
Timothy — Epistles to Timothy— Apostle-splitting — Titus— Silas or Silvanus — 
St. Luke — Twenty-three — Probability in favor of Dionysius, Gaius, and Aris- 
tarchus, Archippas, Antipas, Crescens, Euodius, Linus, Clement, Mark, Judas, 
&c. — The Angels of the Seven Churches — Thirty — These only in the track of 
St. Peter, St. Paul and St. John — Other arguments — Mr. Boardman — Number 
Three abandoned — Addendum — The laying on of the hands of the Presby- 
tery — That sweet word Mesopotamia — Grotius — Presbytery may mean the 
office to which Timothy was raised — It may mean several of the Apostles — 
Ignatius — By — With — Timothy an Evangelist — Timothy also a Deacon ?— Or- 
dain, the same word used to express " many were made sinners" — Great Greek 
— " The most ample account of an ordination to be found in Scripture" — Fine 
days' work for Presbyterians— A fourth Order of the Ministry. Pp. 375-430. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

NUMBER FOUR ; OR, PRESBYTERIANISM AMONG THE FATHERS. 

The Fathers— Aerius, the madman, first assailed Episcopacy— He denied also the 
Deity of Christ — Dr. Miller's dealings with Augustine, Hilary, Jerome, and 
Cyprian — A Father is a Father — The Fathers all Episcopalians— What did 
"those passages" mean! — Perish Episcopacy! — Art of quoting — Augustine, as 
he is— A gentleman— What Augustine says of Aerius— Chrysostom— "Various 
readings" of Dr. Miller — " Going beyond" — A Bishop, no striker ! — Chrysostom 
on " the laying on of the hands of the Presbytery" — Theodoret — Read six lines 
further on — Dr. Miller skips — Hilary, the Deacon — Consigno — The art of trans- 
lating — Changes and innovations enumerated — Dr. Miller's comment on his 
translation — Dr. Miller and Hilary compared — Hilary changed into Ambrose — 
Vice versa — Queer quotations — One more twisting of Hilary — Ruling Elders, 
an absolute order in the Church— Only Dr. Miller's translation— Presbyterian 
traditions — Irenajus, brother and colleague of Presbyters — Numidicus, a 
"Ruling Elder," turns out a "glorious Priest" — Dr. Bowden and the Ruling 
Elders at Carthage — Council of six thousand Bishops — St. Patrick — Forty 
Churches destroyed in Rome aloue — A Bishop only the pastor of a single con- 



xiv 



CONTENTS. 



gregation — Six thousand Bishops in a province— Only, one congregation in 
Rome or Constantinople — Parish— Diocese— Shaking hands with the Jew and 
infidel — Immense multitudes of Christians — Dilemma — Standing Moderator — 
Better stick to the old story — Irenaeus — Why Dr. Miller stopped his quotation 
just where he did — Ignatius — Mr. Hall an hundred years out of the way — Dr. 
Miller's extracts from Ignatius— Something odd— What the Bat said to the Cat 
and the Hawk— Another dexterous somerset of Dr. Miller's— Dr. Miller against 
Dr. Miller — Mr. Powell's mangling of Ignatius — Pick out the pieces — The 
mangled and the true — Archbishop Wake's translation — No wonder the Meth- 
odists are falling back into the Church — Lord King and Sclater— Read the 
Apostolic Fathers — Gather up the bones of the martyrs — Jerome a Presbyte- 
rian ? — Epistle to Evagrius— The whole Epistle— What Dr. Miller skipped — 
Ordinatione excepta — Successors of the Apostles — Apostolical traditions — 
Did Dr. Miller see it ? — K Other passages" — Jesuits— Dr. Eddy skipped " ordi- 
nation excepted/''— His, book bought up and suppressed — Jerome's " kind of a 
loose comparison" — Old Testament analogy — Threefold orders in both — Ro- 
man Deacons — Jerome once more — How Bishops came to be set over Presby- 
ters — The want precedes the provision — Many Apostolical men— Keep com- 
pany with " famous Jerome '?"— Dr. Miller agrees with Jerome !— *By degrees"— 
Explained by Jerome himself — " In process of time''' — Dr. Miller's quotations — 
Read the Fathers. Pp. 431-479. 

CHAPTER XXIY. 

PRACTICAL TEACHINGS. 
Unsatisfied cravings and longings — Calvinism creates Unitarianism, or something 
else — God incarnate but to suffer — The true idea of the Incarnation — The 
Church the fullness of Him that filleth all in all — Union with Christ, one of the 
lost pearls of Sectarianism — Deficiencies of Calvinism — Dr. Alexander on Bap- 
tismal regeneration of infants — Xo fruits of the Spirit ? — Camp-meeting song — 
What will he give to the poor? — Calvinistic view of the Trinity — Repentance — 
Increased rapidity of conversion — Faith — Emptiness of revivalism — Can faith 
save him? — Casting one's self on Christ — Triumphant death-bed — Delirium 
tremens — No reliance to be placed in death-bed repentance — Result of modern 
justification by faith — Faith not undervalued by the Church — The Altar and the 
Cross — Arthur Carey — Laud — Formation of character — Dreams, voices, 
&c— Calvinistic regeneration— Sinners do not always die in despair— Good men 
often not triumphant in death— Austerity of Calvinism— Tortures during boy- 
hood—Revivalism produces skepticism— Believe severely— How Franklin be- 
came an infidel— Calvin's Sermons not from the Gospels— Luther said, " The 
Gospel is not in the Gospels"— The Church has always her " Gospel" for the day. 
Pp. 480-503. 

CHAPTER NX V. 

RAGS OF POPERY. 

Bann3 of Marriage— Too near of kin— A hue and cry— Fox's Book of Martyrs- 
Dread and horror of Popery— Boyish Protestantism— What is Popery ?— Put- 
ting on again the " rags"— Prayers over the dead— Chaunting aud Choirs— Or- 



CONTENTS. 



XV 



gans— Gown and bands— Forms of prayer— A. B. C. F. M. in Constantinople— 
The Cross — Scripture proper names — Nasal twang — Pictures of the Saviour or 
Virgin — Sisters of Mercy— Daily prayer and weekly Eucharist— Marriage by 
Ministers — Architecture of the Dark Ages, stained glass, &c. — Ave sanctissima — 
Form of the Cross — Organ-man — Apostasies from the Church to Popery — 
Most of the Apostates once Puritans — Puritanism drove them there — Lord Mel- 
bourne, the " liberal)" died a Papist and a Jesuit of the short robe — " Evangel- 
icals" and Papists work together against the Church — Lord John Russell — Ev- 
angelicals used by the Jesuits — Same combination in British colonies and in the 
United States— Threats of reforming the Prayer Book — Warning to the Evan- 
gelicals — Bushnell — Tendencies — Puritanize the Church, and Eome's work is 
done. Pp. 504-516. 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

THE TWIN SISTERS. 

Extremes meet — Parallel of Popery and Presbytery in infallibility, development, 
additions to the Creed, alterations of the canon of Scripture, interference with 
private judgment in non-essentials, mending of Creeds, over-riding of Bishops, 
destroying the nature of a Sacrament, blank Sacraments, denial of the interme* 
diate state, Purgatorial process, exaggeration of faith, &c. — Further parallel in 
regard to " elect infants," rhapsodies and transports, rapidity in preparing sin- 
ners for death, substituting severity of dogma for the severity of a holy life, tak- 
ing oaths and vows with "mental reservations," creating schisms, rebellion 
against heretical princes, exclusion of Scripture, minimum of " hearing mass" 
and " hearing preaching," worshipping by proxy, outward abstinences a substi- 
tute for inward piety, new terms of communion, denial of the cup, veneration 
for relics, dreams, voices, visions, &c, — Adaptability to all varieties of men, &c. 
—Parallel in exaggeration of truths, &c— Unpardonable sin— Combined politi- 
cal action— Popery responsible for all— Geneva her twin sister. Pp. 517-530. 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

VARIOUS OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 

Insignificance of the goings on among the Sects — Universal importance attached to 
what is done in the Church — Pretexts for avoiding the force of argument — Al- 
leged exactions and oppressions of the Church in Ireland— True state of things 
there — Tithes in England — Comparative incomes of the Clergy, and benefac- 
tions by clergy and laity in England — America much more heavily taxed" for 
religion— Life in the Church — Missionary spirit— Society for the Propagation 
of the Gospel — Comparison of the Church with the rest of Protestantism in 
Missions — Drumming the Dutch to baptism — Evangelicalism — Suppression of 
ten Bishoprics — Growth since 1833 — Immense results — Results of the Church 
system on individual character — Weakness of the Church in keeping fasts and 
festivals — Not the day, but the doctrine — Not commanded — Exact days not 
known — Family prayer not commanded — Lent — Christ miraculously sup- 
ported—Fasting tried, and not beneficial— Necessity of fasting— Easter— Ety- 



xvi 



CONTENTS. 



mology — Ancient Easter controversies prove how anciently it was observed, and 
how universally— Circle of family anniversaries— Varying and yet unvarying, 
like the lights of heaven. Pp. 531-550. 

CHAPTER XXVIII 

RETROSPECT. 

The via media saves private reasonings from leading to Popery or Rationalism — 
Recapitulation : — I. Eternal Decrees— II. Predestination to Reprobation— Cer- 
" tain number of the elect— III. Limited Redemption— IV. Adam's sin alone 
makes man liable to " hell fire for ever"— V. Elect infants and idiots— VI. None 
redeemed but the elect only; yet the Gospel to be preached to every creature— 
VII. None but the elect have an effectual calling, yet all are to be called to 
repentance — VIII. Unsatisfactory hair-splitting metaphysics— IX. Off-hand 
prayers, and psalms in rhyme — X. The laity forbidden to join in worship — XI. 
Now a Liturgy— XII. Blessedness of a Liturgy in the sick room— XIII. Lit- 
urgy once approved by dissenters, and they are now yearning for it again-»- 
Henry "Ward Beecher .on the Choral Service — XIV. Presbyterianism without 
Sacraments, except in that lowest sense in which all nature is Sacramental — 
XV. They have no Baptism — Water without the Spirit— XVI. They have two 
baptisms, one signifying positive regeneration in the adult, and one signifying 
no mortal can tell what, in the infant — Elect infants — Reprobate infants — The 
Church holds but ' ; One Baptism"— XVII. No duty, grace or privilege as accru- 
ing from baptism — Parents bound by the baptism of the infant — Child not 
bound because not a consenting party— XVIII. Texts on Baptism ignored — The 
Church alone their proprietor — XIX. Baptism refused to the children of all but 
actual communicants— XX. Presbyterianism the parent of the Baptists, who 
deny baptism to all infants — XXI. Presbyterians practically fast becoming Bap- 
tists — XXII. Confirmation thrown away, though often desired— Their youth 
grow up, taught to believe that they are aliens from Israel, children of the 
devil— XXIII. An Altar gained— XXIV. And a Sacrifice— XXV. The Supper 
of the Lord now a feast, a glorious Eucharist — XXVI. Schism cannot explain 
fully the Scriptures— Discerning the Lord's Body — XXVII. The daily Sacrifice — 
There is but one Altar — XXVIII. Puritanism knows no daily prayer — XXIX. 
Withdrawal of the cup from the laity — Strange mixtures in its stead — XXX. 
The Sacraments refused to the sick and the dying — XXXI. Arbitrary tests — 
XXXII. Soul-destroying assurance — XXXIII. Varying terms of salvation — 
XXXIV. Reducing of religion to a single mental act — XXXV. Restitution 
omitted altogether — XXXVI. Conversion reduced to nervous phenomena — 
Formation of character ignored — XXXVII. Social -virtues overlooked — 
XXXVIII. Distempered frenzies, melancholy and suicide — XXXIX. Compel- 
ling to judge another man's servants — XL. Lone conspicuity of the preacher — 
XLI. What sermons! Glorious pulpit! — XL [I. Dishonour done to Religion by 
rollings, tumblings, screamings, faintings, &c. — XLIII. No certainty of receiv- 
ing any Sacrament — XLIV. Lay-ordination — XLV. The ancient Episcopacy 
now recovered — XLVI. Satisfied with Episcopal ordination — Wesley and 
Coke— Coke wants to be made a true Bishop — Episcopal Orders universally 
recognized as valid. Pp. 551-571. 



CONTENTS. 



xvii 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

THE CHURCH FOUND. 

Voyage now over — Lund ! land ! — Terrific conflict— Reasons for delay— Flesh and 
blood — Mother, departed in faith — Go first and bury thy father — That father's 
consent — Acknowledgment of Presbyterian Orders by some nominal Church- 
men — Gewgaws of a ritual worship— Subjected to a roasting— Hoped he would 
not be a High Churchman — Cease to be a Puritan — Small hopes of preferment. 
Salary — Magna est. Veritas — Resignation of pastoral charge — The gates of 
death — Final resolve — Letter to the Moderator of the Presbytery — Committee 
appointed — Interview — Name stricken from the roll of the Presbytery — More 
fortunate than others — Kindly received by the Bishop and Clergy — Ordained 
Deacon — No regrets— The joyful Eureka and the adoring Alleluia. Pp. 
572-580. 



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